


The Viewless Winds

by StoplightDelight



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, Internment Camp 371 (Star Trek), Medicine, Prisoner of War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2019-06-07 04:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 76
Words: 432,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15211109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StoplightDelight/pseuds/StoplightDelight
Summary: Imprisoned at Dominion Internment Camp 371, Doctor Julian Bashir struggles to adapt. His skills are needed and there is at least a thin hope of escape, but survival at the hands of the Jem'Hadar is a daily struggle for everyone. Much relies on Garak back on Deep Space Nine. But even if Julian does get home, what will follow him?





	1. A Bleak Awakening

" _Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;_  
_to lie in cold obstruction and to rot…_  
_to bathe in fiery floods, or to reside_  
_in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;_  
_to be imprison'd in the viewless winds,_  
_and blown with restless violence round about  
__the pendent world…"_

 _~ from_ _Measure for Measure_

 **The Viewless Winds**  
by  
Stoplight Delight

**Part I, Act I: A Bleak Awakening**

Like a spent swimmer struggling through water choked with pond-weeds, Julian Bashir floundered towards consciousness. Muddled synapses fired and misfired as he struggled to remember what he had done to warrant such a stilted awkening. He had a vivid but disjointed memory of a reception room warmly lit with sparkling clouds of Meezan lightning beetles dancing behind the diaphanous walls of paper lanterns. A brilliant Vulcan doctor, immune to his flirtations but far too insightful about the intricacies of dermolytic eschar reclamation to be abandoned for more promising romantic prospects. A delicate stemmed glass, its bowl like an upturned Tonna shell, filled with a generous measure of Calaman sherry… ah, that was it. Overindulgence, without the adequate prophylactic rehydration or an anticipatory dose of the appropriate catabolic stimulant. A young man's mistake, and one that Julian thought he had left behind at the Academy.

But no liquor, however potent, had ever left him nearly this debilitated the following morning. He did not know if the genetic enhancements performed on his body twenty-six years ago had extended to the efficiency of his liver, but he had never seemed to suffer the same agonies of a hangover that had plagued some of his classmates at Starfleet Medical. Then again, he was not quite certain how heavily he had imbibed the night before. Professionally stimulating though the burn treatment symposium was, it was also tremendously draining. The images and archival recordings of devastating burn traumas (thermal, plasma, radiation, chemical), the panel of patients still undergoing treatment months after their injuries, and the vast implications when weighing historical rates such wounds in battlefield situations against the mounting tensions with the Dominion — all had left Julian uneasy, disheartened, and anxious about the future. In the light of that, an uncommonly generous indulgence in potent spirits was surely not out of the question.

But he had to wake up. Last night's keynote reception had been a much-needed surcease in the middle of a challenging week, but today he had a seminar on the use of cryogenic stasis to stabilize patients in need of transfusion or critical rehydration, and then the practical skills lab for prototype myelin regeneration tools. Hungover or not, Julian Bashir was not about to pass up the opportunities for skills development and collegiate collaboration. Any moment now, the morning alert would ring out from the computer interface by the panoramic window, and he had to wake up.

He was drawing closer now. A brilliant sliver of light seemed to arc through his fogged brain, and he endeavoured to open his eyes. The lids were sluggish, leaden, and they felt swollen closed beneath a crust of rheum that stung and crackled as the membranous muscles twitched. The effort was exhausting, and Julian had to fight the urge to slip back into the dragging darkness behind.

He was blinded by inertia, but his other sense were awakening. He could feel the rest of his body now, heavy and amorphous just beyond the borders of his mind. He could hear the low hum of circuitry and the buzz of an EPS conduit muffled behind a bulkhead. The frequency of these noises was unfamiliar, but after five years living aboard a Cardassian space station, all Federation infrastructure sounded strange to his highly attuned ears. It was the  _whoosh_  of a life-support air exchange that startled him instead: there was no need for life-support, and scarcely even call for climate modulation, on the clement shores of the eastern peninsula of Meezan IV.

Again he struggled to open his eyes, this time making an abortive effort to sit up as well. The muscles of his limbs and abdomen tensed, quivered, cramped uncomfortably and released, and his head thumped back upon a taut and unyielding surface. A ghost of a groan twisted his lips and tensed his vocal chords, but no sound escaped.

Where was he? What had happened?

'Easy,' a low voice, female, admonished. There was a rustle of cloth, and a cold hand settled on Julian's brow. 'It is better not to fight the sedative.'

 _Sedative_? Julian's heartrate, typically a smooth and sublimely fit thirty-five beats per minute, almost tripled. He pondered the effort of trying again to rise, and instead made an attempt at speech. His lips parted with a dry little  _pop_ , and a bloated tongue clicked against the sandy coarseness of his hard palate.

'Lie still,' the woman instructed, her voice more commanding than soothing. 'You have need of water.'

Fighting the urge to struggle further, Julian focused on his breathing and on letting his eyelids flutter against the coarse crust glueing them shut. The woman moved off, and there was the clack and rattle of hollow metals — near, but not too near. Now the off-sync frequency of the noises in the walls took on a more ominous cast.

'Drink. Slowly.' A firm hand snaked under his neck, cupping the base of his skull and lifting it a few centimetres off of the uncompromising surface beneath. A steel rim, rough with rust, touched Julian's lower lip, followed almost at once by the lapping lead edge of a measure of water. Like the woman's hands, it was cold, and Julian sucked at it greedily. An intolerable thirst blazed suddenly through his mouth, his throat, his chest. He swallowed too quickly and coughed, sputtering wetly. The need to breathe overcame the other obstacles to motion, and he pushed himself up with one foot, rolling onto his right side and digging his elbow against something that did yield a little after all. As he cleared his airway, his left hand travelled up to scrub the grit from his eyes and he opened them at last.

The first glimpse of the light was blinding, but in a moment his pupils constricted and his optic nerves adapted and the glare resolved into a gloomy grey glow. Combat readiness training had taught Julian to assess his environment promptly when awaking in uncertain circumstances, but in this moment a more primal instinct held sway: his focus was drawn not to his broader surroundings but to the specific geometric pattern of a humanoid face. Blurred details clarified like an optical sensor brought to rapid calibration, and he found himself looking at the prominent cheekbones and distinctive brow ridges of a Romulan female.

"Who—?" he croaked, the sound catching in his parched throat. "How—?"

"I am Major Kalenna of the Tal Shiar," the woman said briskly. She offered him the bottle in her hand — dented, rusting and of unfamiliar design. "Drink. The sedative they use is very potent, and you are likely dehydrated after your journey."

Julian's eyes narrowed, suspicion born of decades of uneasy politics between the Federation and the Romulan Empire rising in his mind. But thirst was more powerful than doubt, and he took the canteen with his left hand. It shook, a bone-deep tremor that frightened him, but he steadied it with willpower alone and raised the vessel to his lips. He took a more careful mouthful this time, rolling it around with his tongue to soothe the dry tissues. It tasted thickly of calcium deposits and ozone, with a faint undercurrent of sulfur, but there was no indication of any toxin. He swallowed, then allowed himself a somewhat longer draft.

The water had an almost miraculous effect. The fog of bewilderment — of  _drugged_ bewilderment, if the Romulan was telling the truth — began to lift a little, and the unsteadiness in his hands faded away. The throbbing between his temples, almost unnoticed until it began to retreat, eased, and Julian hitched himself up into a more stable position on his hip. He was on a pipe-framed cot, some kind of webbing strung beneath a thin pad of foam. A blanket had been spread over him, and was now tangled askew about his legs. Fumbling with the bottle, he freed his right elbow of the burden of supporting him, and swung his feet down to the floor. His boots grazed the stone composite, and he felt a little jolt of relief. Wherever he was, they had left him his uniform.

Reflexively, he tapped the breast of his jumpsuit with the first two fingers of his right hand, but he was not at all surprised to feel nothing but fabric. Of course they had confiscated his combadge: any competent captor would have. But why had they taken him in the first place? To what end?

"What do you want with me?" he demanded, trying to adjust his seat on the unstable surface of the cot. The Romulan was sitting across from him, several centimetres higher on what was either an unusually broad bench or an uncommonly low table. It was bolted to the floor. "Detaining a Starfleet officer…"

He had meant to go on to cite the relevant passages of the treaty between Romulus and the Federation, but he found himself drawing in a labored breath instead. The throbbing in his head was not gone after all: it had merely retreated for a moment before coming back full-force. He leaned forward over his lap, bracing his elbows against his thighs, and raised the bottle to his lips again. Nausea lurked in his viscera, threatening to expel the water even as it trickled down his esophagus.

The woman's grim, appraising expression did not alter in the least. "I want nothing from you, Lieutenant, and I did not detain you. You are a prisoner, but not in the hands of the Tal Shiar."

He frowned at her. "Then what—" The intricacies of this question, too, eluded him, and he gestured vaguely with his first two fingers before pinching the bridge of his nose as if the pressure could quell his headache.

"We are both prisoners," she said, a careful measured quality now creeping into her tone. "We are being held as enemies of the Dominion."

( _fade_ )

The air seemed to have been sucked out of the room. The cold room, Julian understood now, explaining both the chill of the Romulan's hands and that of the water. The life-support was functioning, but it was evidently not set to parameters that humans would consider comfortable for an indoor space. He estimated that the ambient temperture in this narrow room was below 290 degrees Kelvin. Looking down towards the heavy door with its thick, angular windows, he counted six cots in two rows, one along each wall with two low tables-or-benches down the middle between them. His was in the back left corner of the room, from the door's perspective. Across the way and one cot down lay the only other person in the room: a Breen in a dusky refrigeration suit, flat on their back with beak and visor pointed towards the heavy girders of the ceiling. If the other cots had owners they were not here, and they had left their bunks in strict military order, thin blankets folded crisply and corners squared.

Julian groped for his own blanket, flinging it out of his lap as he tried to straighten his spine. It was difficult to do so. When lying supine, his weight had been evenly distributed over the mesh straps of the cot. Now that he was sitting, they sagged beneath him so that the pipe that formed the long side of the bed dug into his lean thighs. He moved as if to take another mouthful of water, then scoffed and planted the bottle next to his boot. He fixed the Romulan woman — Major Kalenna of the Tal Shiar — with a cold stare.

"That's impossible," he said. "I was on Meezan IV. The Dominion can't penetrate that far into Federation space undetected."

"Apparently they can," said the Major. "What is the last thing you can remember?"

The shell-shaped glass. The Vulcan doctor, with her elegant robes and her rich, dark complexion. The paper lanterns with their delicate passengers. No. Now that the fog was clearing from his brain, he dimly recalled dragging himself across the elegant anteroom of his well-appointed suite. Exhausted after a long day of dynamic learning and emotional strain, he had crawled into the sumptuous bed without even bothering to kick off his boots. It was a bad habit he'd picked up in medical school, and it had only been aggravated on Deep Space Nine, where until the Cardassian mattresses had been replaced no one had bothered with bedsheets.

Perhaps it wasn't such a bad habit after all, he reflected, staring down at the familiar black trousers. It looked like they had taken him just as he was, and in this unfamiliar place he preferred the sturdy, functional familiarity of his uniform to his colourful Bajoran silk pyjamas.

"Where is this place?" he asked softly, reluctant to lift his eyes to the woman again.

"The Jem'Hadar call it Internment Camp 371," she answered. "I do not know the coordinates, but we are deep in the Gamma Quadrant."

Now Julian did look up, comprehension dawning. "You were part of the lost fleet," he said. "The joint task force; the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, lost in the Omarion Nebula. I thought there were no survivors."

 _No other survivors_ , he meant, of course. Garak and Odo had escaped, by means not widely broadcast. In fact, Julian was not sure how much of the account he had been given of events aboard the flagship he should actually believe, but he had never gone to Odo for corroboration. He was not sure whether this was a gesture of trust in Garak, or merely a reluctance to approach the Chief of Security on an obviously sensitive matter.

"There were some," said Kalenna, her sharp eyes suddenly glazed with the thousand-yard stare common to veterans of every world. "Many have died since. This place is not suited to the Cardassian constitution, and my people… my people are not suited to the recreation of the Jem'Hadar."

"Are there other prisoners here? People who weren't with the fleet?" Julian asked. He had forgotten the canteen, but as he shifted on the cot, his boot struck it and he was obliged to swoop down a staying hand before it could spill. As he brought it into his lap, his greeter's expression finally shifted.

She frowned, her lips pursing sourly. "Be careful with that," she admonished. "Prisoners are only permitted two litres per day, and you have already consumed a fifth of my ration."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Julian said reflexively, hurriedly holding the bottle out to her. She waved him off.

"Keep it," she said. "Drink it. You can repay me when you are issued your own. I expect they will be along to fetch you for intake soon enough."

"Intake?" He did not like the sound of that. A memory of a debriefing report flitted through his mind with photographic precision.  _Miles Edward O'Brien, Chief Petty Officer, Incident Report for Stardate 47944…_

Kalenna curled her lip in a peculiarly Romulan fashion, making a soft snort in the affirmative. "And your interview with the Vorta who runs the camp," she said. "Drink. You'll want your wits about you."

She got to her feet, and only then did Julian see that her grey uniform was threadbare and filthy, showing the wear of the long months in captivity. Just how long had it been since the disastrous mission to destroy the Founders' homeworld? Two years? Not quite, but near enough. That he could not recall the precise date did not speak well of his faculties. He took another swallow from the canteen, hoping to drive the last vestiges of the drug from his mind.

The Romulan stopped before the door, craning her neck to peer out of the window. There was no telling what she saw, but she seemed satisfied that the way was clear. She slapped a panel next to the door, and it slid open with a hiss.

A bitter bolt of betrayal struck Julian. Would a Dominion military prison let inmates wander in and out of their cells at will? Clearly the woman was lying, though to what end he could not imagine. He surely held no particular interest for the Tal Shiar — at least nothing that would appear in any of his official files.

"Where do you think you're going?" he asked, unable to keep the challenge from his voice.

"Out," Kalenna said simply. Then she seemed to understand, because she turned on one worn-down heel and tossed her head in tight disdain. "I did not lie to you, human. I am a prisoner, just as you are. They let us move about the compound at will, with the exception of the isolation barracks and the administration wing. There is nothing beyond the atmospheric dome but the emptiness of space. There is nowhere to run."

Then she was gone. Alone with the silent, perhaps sleeping Breen soldier, Julian sagged back against the wall, closing his eyes against the pounding in his head.

( _fade_ )

They came for him ninety minutes later. Major Kalenna had not returned, the Breen had not moved even a millimetre, and no other prisoner had entered the barracks. Julian was lying on his side, knees tucked up for warmth beneath the thin blanket, when the door slid open and two Jem'Hadar bearing wicked-looking rifles stomped in. They flanked the door, boots planted wide, scanning the narrow space as if an ambushing enemy might spring from the tritanium-panelled walls. Another soldier, broader than the first two and with an air of command they did not possess, strode past them and towered over Julian as he picked himself up off the mattress, rolling back onto his elbow again. His head swam. The sedative had not yet cleared from his system.

"On your feet," the Jem'Hadar commanded. When Julian was slow to obey, a rough hand seized him just above the elbow, hauling and shaking him at the same time. "I said  _on your feet_!"

But the blanket was tangled about his legs again, and he stumbled, one knee grazing the floor while the Jem'Hadar held him aloft by his humerus. Julian struggled to get his boots under him, even as the guard started off for the door, dragging him behind. He slipped, scrambled, had a fleeting moment to reflect that if he did not manage to get up he was staring at the grim prospect of a dislocated shoulder or a nasty spiral fracture, and found his feet at last. He shuffled and jolted after his handler, made clumsy by the rough treatment and the residual chemicals in his bloodstream.

He was marched down the corridor, the two Jem'Hadar with their rifles at the ready following in his wake, and into a broader space where heavy pylons supported a bleak dome. This seemed to be some sort of common area: from the shadows and the edges of the space, wary eyes watched. The prisoners were keeping a judicious distance from the striding guards, and Julian caught only brief glimpses of their faces as he passed at an awkward trot. He saw at least one Cardassian, lean and haunted, but if there were Romulans among them he could not pick them out.

Several clusters of pod-like buildings opened onto this barren atrium. Having come from one, Julian was led into another. Here the corridor was cleaner and better lit, and another pair of Jem'Hadar stood guard before a rippling force field. As the prisoner approached, one of them touched a control panel to drop the field. The moment Julian and his rough-handed escort were past, the force field crackled back to life, leaving the armed soldiers behind.

This corridor, like the other, had six heavy doors opening onto it. The Jem'Hadar officer marched to the last one on the right and touched the panel beside it. Instead of opening, the door sounded a chime. After a moment, its seal released and Julian was shoved over the threshold. Caught off-guard and off-balance he fell inelegantly forward, catching himself against the edge of a sleek desk. The Jem'Hadar seized him by the shoulder and pulled him back two paces. Whether the guard placed undue pressure on his clavicle in the process, or whether the drugs had gotten the better of him at last Julian did not know, but he crashed to his knees, his free palm outthrust to brace his fall. The door hissed closed.

The figure that had been standing behind the desk with its four narrow command plinths rounded it with a strange, catlike grace. Blinking fiercely to clear his speckled vision, Julian stared up at the approaching Vorta. He tried to lift one knee, intending to rise, but the grip on his shoulder tightened and the full force of the Jem'Hadar's thickly muscled arm held him down. Making an effort to square the other shoulder, at least, Julian forced his face into calm, impassive contours.

"Well, now," the Vorta chuckled. "Not a very elegant entrance, was it, Doctor? I was told humans were a clumsy species, but I did not expect such a colourful demonstration."

Julian said nothing. He did not know if the interstellar agreements governing the treatment of prisoners of war applied in the Gamma Quadrant, but in any case he would not expect the Dominion to uphold them. His own obligations, however, were clear. He had no intention of answering any questions that extended beyond his vital identification, and he certainly was not going to rise to the bait of idle remarks.

"I hope you'll forgive the delay in greeting you," said the Vorta. "Ordinarily I make it a point to greet all of our  _special_  guests immediately upon arrival, but with the amount of medication in your system it seemed wiser to let you sleep it off. You posed quite a conundrum for the extraction team. The dose of anesthetic required to keep you under was considerably greater than anticipated."

"I have a high tolerance," Julian said coldly, remembering too late that he did not plan to engage in this conversation. But the choice of words had angered him.  _Medication, dose, anesthetic_ , as if he were a patient in their care. As if they had been treating him, not drugging him into submission in service of an interstellar kidnapping.

"That you do," cooed the Vorta. He looked at the Jem'Hadar soldier and smiled unctuously. "There's no need to restrain him, First. I'm sure the good doctor will behave himself." He shot a cool glance at Julian, his voice thinning considerably as he added a curt, "Won't you?"

Julian neither spoke nor gave any positive sign, but the clamping hand withdrew. His shoulder throbbed where the powerful fingers had dug in, but he resisted the urge to roll it. He corrected his posture, briefly considering climbing to his feet. He didn't, not so much because he feared they would prevent it as because he was feeling increasingly lightheaded and it was probably a good idea to stay where he was. He was tempted to sit back on his heels, but quelled the urge. If he was obliged to kneel, he would at least keep his spine straight while he did so.

"What did you give me?" he asked, voice and eyes carefully unyielding. Instead of the anxiety and violation he felt, he infused his tone with academic sternness and a wisp of contempt. "There could be adverse effects, longterm sequelae. Human physiology is not like—"

The Vorta laughed, an airy and yet somehow mirthless sound that echoed off the walls. This room was the same width as the barracks where Julian had awakened, but less than half the depth. The rear of the pod had been partitioned off — living quarters for the Vorta, perhaps? The prison's supply of Ketracel White was probably kept back there, too. That might be useful knowledge.

"Oh, I have nothing to do with collections," he said. "You would have to ask the team who brought you here — but they're long gone, of course. Off to their next effort for the glory of the Dominion. You're in my keeping now, Doctor. I hope we shall be great friends."

He said this last in a breathless, insincere way that reminded Julian of a schoolchild reading an assigned passage without understanding or enthusiasm, except perhaps for mocking the old forms. The Vorta turned crisply on his heel and strolled back behind the desk, touching one of the computer terminals and skimming pale eyes over the screen.

"Doctor Julian Bashir, Chief Medical Officer of the military outpost Deep Space Nine. You're quite a prize, you know. We are honoured to be called upon to house you here at Internment Camp 371." The Vorta cast a poisonous smile back over his shoulder. "Isn't that so, First?"

"It is an honour to serve the Founders," the Jem'Hadar said stonily. "In whatever way they see fit."

"Indeed it is," said the Vorta. He turned again, clasping his hands. "But where are my manners? We haven't introduced ourselves. I am Deyos, and this is First Ikat'ika. How do you do? That is how you humans put it, is it not?  _How do you do_?"

"I'm not the prize you think I am," said Julian, spitting out another terse contradiction to mask the gulf of terror opening in his chest. "I am not privy to classified military information. I'm a doctor. And I don't imagine Alpha Quadrant anatomy and medicine are of much use to you."

"Oh, we don't want you for your  _knowledge_ , Doctor," the Vorta clucked, condescension once more on the upswing. "In that respect I assure you, you're quite insignificant. No, you're useful in another way entirely."

Absurdly, Julian felt his pride bristling, injured by this blithe dismissal of his skills. This silver-tongued bureaucratic warmonger's opinion didn't matter, and in any case Julian had been arguing the same thing himself just a moment ago in a clumsy attempt to belay thoughts of interrogation. Yet the words were salt in an old wound.  _You're quite insignificant_. They burned, deeply and perniciously, no matter how disdainfully his intellect brushed them off.

"I'm of no use to you in any way," he argued. "Starfleet will be looking for me. My captain will come for me. You'll be overrun by starships before you know it."

"Starfleet isn't looking for you. No one is, not even the redoubtable Captain Sisko," said the Vorta. "You're supposed to be at a burn treatment conference, remember? No one on your little space station even knows that you're gone."

"The conference authorities will notice when I don't turn up for my scheduled seminars," said Julian, his voice still steady and his faith unshaken. "Attendance is monitored for ongoing educational requirements for licensure."

"True," said Deyos. "It's taken, but it's hardly enforced. Even if you were to miss a session or two, they wouldn't come  _looking_  for you."

"It doesn't matter." Julian thrust back his head a little farther, a prideful little jolt of his chin. "I'm due back at Deep Space Nine in four days' time. When I don't return, there'll be questions. They'll find out that the last time I was seen at the conference was during the keynote reception, and they'll start looking."

He didn't know how they would find him, whisked out of the heart of Federation space and smuggled back through the wormhole somehow, halfway across the Galaxy in a place even a Tal Shiar representative who had been here for almost two years could not identify. But that wasn't his problem. Jadzia would find some forensic evidence of his abduction — a residual transporter signature, maybe, or an anomalous reading on the Meezan planetary sensor grids. Odo would put two and two together, somehow. At his tactical console onboard the  _Defiant_ , Worf could track a dikironium cloud creature through a plasma storm. And Captain Sisko would never abandon the search.

"No," the Vorta cooed, pursing his lips in a grotesque parody of sympathetic regret. "No, I'm afraid not, Doctor. There will be no questions. No glorious hunt. No daring rescue. You won't even miss out on those educational credits of yours."

Fear, cold and scabrous, clenched Julian's heart. He did not understand what the Vorta was saying, but the tone of saccharine certainty was positively corrosive, burning through his faith in his comrades to the wellspring of terror beneath.

Fighting the rising tide, Julian twisted his lips into what he desperately hoped was a disdainful sneer. "If you — if your  _extraction team_  — tried to stage my death, good luck," he snapped. "That's been tried before, and it didn't fool them."

"Stage your death?" Deyos parroted, almost shrill with delight. "My, my, you  _are_  an imaginitive species. Such a peculiar talent. Difficult to see the evolutionary advantage. Imaginative, but not especially bright, I see. Tell me, Doctor: why would the Founders bother with such ridiculous theatrics, only to deposit you  _here_  to live out the rest of your little life in penal obscurity? Your knowledge is of no use to all-knowing Gods: you've said so yourself. The medical miracles you're so proud of are child's play to them."

He gazed at the Jem'Hadar soldier, smiling almost dreamily. "And a good thing, too, isn't it, First?"

The First said nothing, but Julian twisted to look up at him, trying to ignore the way the contortions constricted his jugular vein and aggravated the drug-induced dizziness. His head whipped back towards the Vorta, who was smirking delightedly.

"What are you saying?" Julian croaked. All pretext of strength was gone from his voice. His heart was stuttering in his chest, and his lungs twitched and spasmed with the effort of drawing breath. He could not feel his hands, or his legs below the knee: only cold weight.  _Stress-induced vasodilation_ , the clinical part of his mind parsed crisply.  _A late-stage symptom of vasovagal shock._

"I think you know what I'm saying." Deyos was rolling the words around his tongue, savouring them. "No one will look for you, because as far as they're concerned, you haven't gone anywhere. You'll conclude your conference, catch your scheduled transport back to your precious space station, and be back at work the next morning, cheerful and competent as ever. Captain Sisko, all your  _loyal_  friends — the ones who surely would have searched so faithfully for you if you  _did_  disappear — they'll never even know you're gone."

For a cavernous eternity, Julian could not speak. The edges of his vision were receding, growing dark and narrowing into a hazy tunnel through which the Vorta leered gleefully, relishing every nuance of his expression as the true horror of the situation overtook him.

"No," he whispered at last, a hollow, broken syllable that shattered in the dead air. " _No._ That's not… you can't…"

"Oh,  _I_  can't do any of it!" said Deyos. "All  _I_  can do is keep you here, out of trouble, while your replacement goes about his glorious work. All this is the Founders' doing: their brilliant plan, their flawless execution, their triumph in the days to come. It's beautiful, isn't it, Doctor? The perfect solution."

Distantly, some part of Julian's unnaturally limber mind was unspooling the countless implications: that the shape-shifter who had replaced him would in a matter of days be installed in a position of supreme trust in one of the most fortified positions in the Federation, if not the entire Alpha Quadrant; that the Dominion had infiltrated the Klingon High Council and Starfleet Command, and it had been arrogant of him (of all of them) to assume Deep Space Nine was immune to such incursions when the _Defiant_ had already been targeted at least once; that Deyos must be absolutely certain that there was no scope for escape, no hope of rescue, to have handed a prisoner such an ironclad incentive to run. But the rest of him was reeling, fracturing under the weight of unimaginable calamity, skittering off into the distant recesses of his brain as the room listed perilously to starboard.

"Take him out and let him meet the other prisoners," Deyos said, cool contempt and satisfaction in a voice that was muffled by the roaring in Julian's ears. "He'll have plenty of time to make friends, I'm sure."

Iron hands clamped on both arms, again just above the elbow, and Julian was hauled up. He could not keep his feet under him: his knees and ankles were rubbery and unresponsive. He was half carried, half dragged through the noisy door, down the corridor and past the force field and the two Jem'Hadar guards. He was struggling to catch his breath, to gain some semblance of control over his body or his mind, when he was flung forward into the atrium, falling in a boneless heap onto the seamless stone floor.

( _fade_ )


	2. The Unkillable Man

**Part I, Act II: The Unkillable Man**

He did not lose consciousness, but Julian suspected that was a near thing. For what seemed like a long time he lay there, one arm curled where it had flung itself to shield his head from the fall, the opposite knee tucked up under him, the other limbs splayed awkwardly. The floor was hard, painful against his hip and his shin and one quite likely bruised shoulder, but it was also cold — deliciously cold against the flaming skin of his face. The coolness drove back the vasovagal nausea, and gradually his breathing eased and he began to get control of his pulse. Normal humans, natural humans, could not do that as he could. That he was able to manage it now was comforting, and possibly a sign that he was beginning to shake off the effects of the unknown sedative.

It was when he heard people beginning to stir around him that Julian started to contemplate trying to rise. The other prisoners had scattered when the Jem'Hadar First had come swooping out of the administration corridor; they could not be blamed for that. Now the guards were gone and they were curious. The murmurs came next. He did not bother to listen. He focused instead on gathering his wits and his extremities, freeing his pinned forearm and raising his head from the ground so that it hung like a ripe moba fruit between arched shoulders. Tucking his elbows hoisted everything a little farther, and he shifted to draw in his other knee.

That was when a hand closed on his ankle.

Julian's first reflex was to jerk his leg free, but whoever had grabbed him was prepared for this and resisted accordingly. Another hand took a higher hold, closing on a fistful of the tough uniform cloth behind his calf. With a nimbleness he would not have expected of himself at this moment, Julian hitched his weight off his forearms, slapped both palms against the floor, and executed a perfect knee press in one fluid motion. For an instant the grip on his ankle faltered.

"Grab him! Hold him!" a throaty male voice snarled. And before Julian could wrest free his captured limb or achieve some more effective posture, the accomplice pounced.

The hands were bonier than those of the Jem'Hadar First, but they grabbed him in exactly the same spot on each arm, yanking backward at the same time a distinctively ridged patella collided with his thoraic spine. Still disoriented and in no condition for a skirmish, Julian crashed forward again, the same outraged shoulder slamming into the floor. He turned his head and arched his neck at the last moment, just in time to be sure that it was his cheekbone that made contact with the stone instead of his brow or his teeth.

But the one who had his arms was only restraining him. The one at his feet had a keener purpose. Julian felt his foot slipping against the insole as his boot began to shift.

He remembered August 31, 2024, a chilled and humid day in San Francisco. He and Commander Sisko had shucked their uniforms, sturdy Starfleet footwear and all, in a murky upstairs alcove of a sedate stone building that, properly maintained or restored, could have housed dozens of people in dignity and comfort instead of squalor. But that had been a willing trade, if not precisely an equitable exchange. Even the enslaved Terran workers in the nightmarish other Universe had not tried to despoil him of his clothing, but there was no doubt in Julian's mind that this was what was happening now. The person grappling with his foot was trying to steal his boots.

He was not about to let that happen. He kicked out, trying to writhe out of the grip of the alien who was now kneeling between his shoulder blades. Fingers scrabbled, faltered briefly, and resumed their hold below. Julian flexed his foot as far as he was able, every muscle in his ankle and shin resisting the effort to strip the boot away. It was a foolish and ultimately futile gesture, more likely to earn him a dislocated or hyperextended knee instead of a victory, but he was running out of ideas.

One assailant was hissing orders at the other, who snapped back an exasperated protest. The Universal Translator, implanted securely behind his right cavum concha, was doing its work, but Julian's ears were again filled with the roar of his blood and did not care to listen. He had, as he might have tersely told an inquiring party,  _more pressing concerns_.

He tried to twist his leg free again, even as his elbows were hooked around one forearm, the opposite hand driving his face into the floor with bone-bruising force. Unfortunately, his own efforts coincided almost perfectly with another vicious yank on the boot. Sharp, sickening pain shot through his knee, and Julian's foot extended almost of its own accord. The boot slid free, baring his standard-issue sock and eliciting a clattering thump and a startled grunt as the person on the other end fell back in sudden release.

Not even a heartbeat later, Julian's other leg was being dragged out from under him. He closed his eyes, mustering for the next phase of the struggle and positively resolved not to give up quietly. If he was going to spend the rest of his time here barefoot, he was going to do it knowing he had fought to the best of his present ability.

A ratcheting sound clattered through the air, momentarily undecipherable. The attacker at Julian's feet froze, and the fingers tangled brutishly in his hair slackened their grip as the person on his back looked up in sudden wariness. Only in the startling stillness that settled so suddenly over the tangle of grappling bodies did Julian's brain finally catalogue the salient sound. Someone had cleared his or her throat, and very pointedly at that.

"On your feet," a resonant voice, not deep but ponderously expansive, seemed to fill the space — though given the size of the atrium that should have been impossible. Julian's ears and temples were throbbing, and when the knee jerked back and off his spine he sucked in an unsteady breath, rolling his head so that his brow was flat against the floor. The freed cheekbone throbbed. "You as well, Lugek. Keep your hands to yourself."

Julian's left foot fell from his attacker's hand. He drew up the knee hastily, as if the nearer to his core he got his remaining boot, the likelier he would be to keep it. His arms were restored to him, and he drew them up and forward, curling his hands and wrists about the crown of his head. It was an instinctively defensive posture, a semaphore of weakness, but just then he did not care. He had been drugged, abducted, dragged halfway across the Galaxy, manhandled by Jem'Hadar and mocked by a Vorta, and he had just learned that a Changeling infiltrator had been dispatched to take his place back home. He had been through quite enough for one day, and he just wanted to remain where he was and protect his skull, thank you.

"Be about your business, now. I shall see to greeting the newcomer," the resounding voice went on. There was something about that unique cadence, and the jovial, conversational way in which the words — which were at the same time obviously the sternest of imperious commands — tripped off the tongue that stirred a memory in Julian's addled brain. A memory, and a crawling sensation of dawning revulsion. To put it bluntly, the voice was giving him the creeps.

" _Leave_  that!" This was a singsong lilt, obviously meant to convey the speaker's weariness with the tiresome imbeciles who surrounded him each day. The voice dropped almost to a murmur as he added pleasantly but just for the ears of those immediately at hand, "The human is under  _my_  protection. See that is generally known."

"Yes," someone puffed. Another mumbled hurriedly; "I understand." Two pairs of feet skidded away, and Julian could hear the telltale  _flap-flap_  of a loose sole. His boots must have been a terrible temptation.

There was a longer silence then, during which Julian fought to corral his galloping heart. Ninety-five beats per minute really was entirely too fast for his liking, and he did not know how other people sustained it. His whole body tensed, waiting for whatever was next to come and knowing, in every thrumming muscle sheath, that it could not be good.

But no rough hands seized him and no one drove a foot into the tempting cavern beneath his curled ribcage where his unprotected abdomen heaved. Heavy footfalls moved towards him, and then around, making a hundred-degree arc around his legs. There was a rustle of clothing and a low huff of effort. Then the breathing swept upward as the man stood again. Julian could feel the watcher's eyes burning into the back of his neck.

"Doctor Julian Bashir," the peculiar voice said, savouring the words much as the Vorta had done earlier. "Late of Starfleet. What brings you to this desolate place."

Remembering now but unable to quite believe it, Julian uncurled. He got his hands under him and shoved himself up, sitting back on his heels and curling at the waist so that he could look up at the figure towering over him. He was physically shrunken from his former self, the nondescript civilian garments sagging loosely from his frame, but the broad face and the penetrating eyes were all but unchanged. The glabellar teardrop and the supraorbital ridges lent that face an ominous authority that was difficult to imagine on the same man born to any other species. He was staring at the Federation doctor just as piercingly as Julian stared now at him, despite the half-smile playing on his thin upper lip.

Julian had to wet his own with the tip of his tongue before he was able to speak. When he did, the single syllable burst out in a low and terse exhalation that was neither astonished nor repelled but somehow also both.

" _Tain_."

( _fade_ )

Enabran Tain, onetime head of the Obsidian Order, galactic spymaster, torturer, and mentor and betrayer of one of Julian's closest (if not precisely most trusted) friends, cut loose his unbearable gaze and smiled as he looked the human over.

"You remember me!" he said, sounding more like a gratified grandfather than a brutal assassin. "How delightful."

He took a step closer and Julian's body jerked as he fought the urge to shrink away. Tain was holding his boot, the toe lightly scuffed. He held it out amicably.

"You'd best put it back on," he warned. "It's cold out here. We wouldn't want you succumbing to frostbite."

It wasn't nearly  _that_  cold in the atrium, Julian thought cynically, though it did make the barracks seem cosy at fifteen degrees Celsius. But then, Cardassians had a lower tolerance for cold — and in any case, he doubted very much that Enabran Tain prized precision over rhetoric. He reached out to take his boot, curling his fingers over the lip. For an almost imperceptible instant he pulled against solid resistance. Then the corner of Tain's mouth twitched and he released his hold, allowing Julian to take the thing into his lap.

The silent implication was clear, though it surely would have eluded a man with slower eyes or less cause for suspicion. Julian had this boot only by the munificence of Enabran Tain, and he could expect to tender repayment someday.

He rolled onto his hip, careful to choose the one that had not taken the worst of his bouts with the floor, and sat. He tucked his left leg and drew up his right, keeping both eyes on the Cardassian as he shoved his foot back where it belonged. He flicked the hem of his trouser leg neatly around the shaft of the boot, then pushed back about half a metre so that the older man no longer loomed above him like a Hebitian gargoyle.

"Garak thinks you're dead," Julian said stiffly, unable to mask the coldness in his voice. His prior dealings with Tain had not imbued him with any affection for the man.

Tain chuckled. "Garak's knowledge is no more infallible than his skills are," he said. "And you should know better than to take his word for anything."

But Julian remembered the blankness in his friend's pale eyes as Garak had related the end of his bitter tale: something no sarcastic quip or counterfeit levity could mask. Mistaken he might have been, but the tailor had not been lying. He truly had believed Tain dead, and had mourned him in his own secretive way. They had all believed the joint fleet lost with all hands, save the two rescued by the  _Defiant_. Her crew had escaped by the skin of their teeth as it was.

But of course, if a Tal Shiar officer had survived to be taken prisoner, it was only fitting that Tain had as well. He was, after all, a man so notoriously unkillable that he had survived two decades as the head of the Obsidian Order and — Julian suspected, still more remarkably — several years of peaceable retirement as well.

"It seems that Garak's mistake is my good fortune, at least today," Julian said, trying to let some of the hostility bleed from his tone. It might be a mistake to acknowledge the debt, but it seemed like the most expedient way to defuse the crackling tension between them. He did not have the endurance for much more of it, not today. "I'm grateful for your assistance."

"Don't mention it, my boy!" Tain said airily. "We Alpha Quadrant folk must stick together. You shouldn't have any more trouble with the Cardassians," he added more quietly. "They don't follow me these days, but they still fear me. I suppose if it weren't for the understandable resentment…" He sighed theatrically, shrugging his shoulders. "Are you going to stay down there all day?"

Julian honestly might have considered it. The effort needed to hoist himself to his feet seemed enormous, and now that his adrenaline was on the ebb again he felt overcome with an unspeakable weariness. But he had to get back to his assigned barracks somehow, and the chill of the floor was beginning to seep through his clothes. Resignedly he shifted, getting one foot under him and remembering too late that he might not want to put his full weight on his right knee. The dagger of pain from the abused joint caught him by surprise, and he faltered.

A hand thrust into his line of sight as Tain closed the distance between them more quickly than his age and condition should have allowed. Unable to afford the luxury of analyzing the choice for its every repercussion, Julian seized hold and let the aged Cardassian haul him up. The motion was smooth and a little too swift. His head swam and he swayed where he stood. A firm hand on his shoulder kept him from reeling too far. As he found his bearings, Tain patted him twice, bracingly, and began to walk.

Julian followed, taking a loping half-stride so that he could fall into step with the other man. "Cardassians and Romulans from the Omarion Nebula," he said. "There's a Breen in the barracks I woke up in. And clearly some of these people are from the Gamma Quadrant…" He nodded towards a trio of aliens with unfamiliar facial structures, huddled in the shadow of one of the pylons that upheld the roof. "What about humans?"

"Oh, you're the only human here, Doctor," Tain said sunnily. "The only Federation prisoner of any kind, at least in the time I've been here. Did they take you in battle? It seems unlike the Jem'Hadar to respect the person of a medical officer when they've killed everyone else aboard ship, but then again, they do continue to surprise me."

"I wasn't taken in battle." Julian was surprised by the vitriol with which he spat the words. He was no stranger to bitter resentment, but he had always believed it to be a very finely tuned weapon — one with only two true targets. That it was burning so hotly now was at once enlightening and deeply disturbing. "I was kidnapped from a medical conference on Meezan IV."

Tain stopped and turned to regard him with some surprise. "Were you, now?" he asked. "Fell asleep in your accomodations and woke up here, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Julian flatly. A part of him was demanding to know how he could have been so stupid, although the rest of his mind understood that there had been no reasonable grounds for uncommon precautions. He had thought himself safe on a Federation world, in a luxurious resort city, among people who shared his skills and interests.

But then he thought of the radicals on Risa, warning that the people of the Federation had grown soft and complacent. Maybe there had been grounds for precautions after all.

That was ridiculous. He was a Starfleet officer. He had made a rational assessment of his environment, and had seen no risk that any sensible person could have anticipated.

"Interesting," said Tain, walking on. Once more, Julian had to hasten to catch up. "Did Deyos tell you anything of use?"

"Such as?" It was a feeble evasion, but he was not at his sophistic best.

"Did he give you any idea of why you've been taken?" the Cardassian pressed. "Perhaps you're not one-of-a-kind after all, Doctor."

 _What does that mean_? The question was on the tip of his tongue, but Julian swallowed it. He was not prepared to face Enabran Tain in a debate, or debriefing, or whatever this was shaping up to be.

"There was a Romulan watching over me when I woke up," he said. "Major Kalenna of the Tal Shiar. She said I would be issued my rations after intake. I assume that was my interview with the Vorta?"

Tain snorted. "The ones who are extracted rather than captured in battle seem to be spared the worst of  _that_ ," he scoffed. "I suppose it's because they can search you and run their scans while they've got you sedated in transit. Count your blessings, my boy. You can't dodge every indignity, but you've got past this one."

Julian was not so certain of that. He thought he would have preferred a waking intake, however undignified, over the idea that a group of Dominion operatives had done what they pleased to him while he was drugged into helplessness. The idea made him feel filthy.

"The Major gave me part of her water ration," he said, trying to distract himself as much as to carry on the conversation. They were on the far side of the atrium now, passing the corridor that led to the barracks he had come from. To their right was a low ring in the ground, six metres across with three cylindrical posts rising up from its lighted perimeter. The rest of the stone floor was bare, but inside the ring it had been strewn with a layer of fine, grey soil. It was flecked darker here and there, in a strand of speckles that looked suspiciously like a spray of blood. Julian's head swivelled as he walked, unable to tear his eyes from the ring until he had passed it by. "I want to replace it…"

"I wouldn't advise asking after rations," said Tain, the cheerful bluster in his voice wavering a little. "They're issued once a day, at mealtime. The next day, you trade in your empty bottles for two full ones. You've missed mealtime today. Best wait until tomorrow."

"But…" Julian thought of the canteen back in the barracks, a little over half full and only a litre at capacity. The back of his throat was burning with thirst again, and he had no means of knowing whether he had been given maintenance hydration during his journey here. Not to mention Kalenna, who was short of water on his account.

"Ask them if you like, Doctor," Tain sang out in a tone that clearly said  _I certainly can't stop you!_  "But I can't protect you from the Jem'Hadar."

Julian hated himself for the twist of fear that coiled beneath his ribs at those words. "Show me where to go," he said tightly. "Which one do I speak to?"

"If all you want to do is get yourself thrown in isolation, take your pick!" Tain laughed. He gestured up the length of the atrium to a pair standing perpendicular to one another with their rifles at the low-ready position. "If you mean that you want to know where to go tomorrow, the prisoners' mess is through there."

He pointed to an alleyway between two of the barracks pods. "They sound an alarm when it's time to gather. Doesn't do to be late."

Julian craned his neck, trying to peer around an oblique corner at the end of the passage. "Is that a ore conveyor?" he asked, squinting as if that could imbue him with the power to see through walls. All he could see was the end of the thing, but it looked troublingly familiar.

"This place used to be an ultritium mining colony," said Tain. He cocked his head curiously. "What do you know about ore conveyors?"

" _Used_  to be?" Julian asked, ashamed too late of the relief in his voice.

"Years ago," Tain agreed. He chuckled. "That Bajoran Major of yours filling your heads with tales of the horrors of the Occupation? Fear not, Doctor! The Dominion doesn't need to rely on convict labour, not when they've got entire worlds full of servile species, anxious to do as they're told. You won't be called upon to work, at least not in that fashion."

Julian made an effort to disguise just how glad he was of this news. His three days in ore processing three years ago loomed large in his memory as some of the most miserable of his life, but that didn't mean he wanted Tain to see him grateful for any mercies the Dominion might show.

He needn't have worried. Those last few words had lingered strangely on the older man's tongue, and now there was a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed to realize it, and to reel himself in. He squared his shoulders and gave a sharp cough, one hard staccato that rang through the air and made the nearest Cardassian (this one still in the rigid grey armour of his military uniform) stiffen like a startled hound.

"Let's go back to the barracks," Tain said, with the air of a man making a magnanimous suggestion for the comfort of an unexpected guest. "I expect you'll feel more like yourself after you've had some rest. You humans do sleep an extraordinary amount, do you know that?"

"I didn't know you had made human sleep habits a study," said Julian. It was almost a fragment of ordinary conversation.

"Oh, yes," said Tain, almost with relish. "There's no end to the things I know about your species."

He turned almost elegantly and started off towards the appropriate pod, although Julian had not pointed it out to him. Uneasily, the Doctor hung back. "What about the water for Major Kalenna?" he asked.

"There's nothing you can do about that now," Tain assured him. "If you ask the guards, they'll put you in isolation. Then the Romulan won't get her refund, and you'll never wash those drugs out of your system. She can wait until tomorrow. She ought to know better than to squander her rations, anyway."

"It was an act of kindness," Julian said tightly, scowling at the back of Enabran Tain's head as the Cardassian strolled on. "I suppose that's not in your vocabulary."

" _Folly_ isn't in my vocabulary, Doctor," Tain corrected. "But you want to settle your debt, and I respect that. I like a man who discharges his obligations as promptly as he can."

He made another tight, militaristic little turn, and slapped the control panel for the correct door. "They repainted the numbers two years ago, in Romulan and Cardassian characters as well as Dominionese," he said, pointing to the glyphs above the lintel. "I doubt they'll redecorate for your benefit, but I expect after all these years on Terok Nor you can at least count to ten. Barracks 6."

He passed through the door, but Julian hung back on the threshold. The long room was still empty save for the Breen, who did not appear to have moved at all.

"How did you know I was put in here?" he asked.

Tain, now halfway up the room on his way to the cot just past the silent sentinel in the refrigeration suit, turned to look back in mild surprise. "Why, Doctor Bashir!" he said, dramatically astonished. "Do you think I chanced to see you cowering on the floor and recognized you  _then_? I've been waiting all day for you to come to your senses. I just don't have the Romulan woman's predilection for hovering over sickbeds."

Julian did not know if this ought to make him more uneasy or less, but it did at least have the ring of truth. He crossed the threshold and the door slid to behind him with a whinging hiss that was almost a scolding.

"How kind of you to take an interest in my welfare," he said sarcastically.

"Not an entirely altruistic interest, I'll admit," said Tain, shrugging inconsequentially.

He grunted as he lowered himself onto the bench-or-table that lay between his cot and the one with the dishevelled blanket. Putting aside his unease at drawing too near the other man aside, Julian moved to sit down on the cot he'd awoken in. The relief of leaning back against the wall was almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. His whole body ached with exhaustion, and more than a few areas with incipient contusions as well. He didn't raise his fingers to probe his left cheek, but he was almost certain it was already darkening to a bruise.

"What do you want from me, Tain?" he asked frankly, lifting his head away from the blessed support of the frigid metal wall so that he could once again look the Cardassian squarely in the eyes. He knew there wasn't much challenge in his anymore, but at least he was quite sure his impatience shone through.

"In due time, Doctor Bashir," said the older man. "Right now, I'm just about finished with making conversation. Your arrival has disrupted my schedule, you know, and it's time for my nap. But just one thing before we conclude this delightful little chat."

Julian sighed. "Fine," he said, enunciating crisply.

"Garak." It was not what Julian had expected to hear. His brows furrowed, even as Tain's expression took on an intensity that was almost frightening. "He is still on your space station? Still among your Starfleet compatriots? Still alive?"

"Yes," said Julian, perplexed. "Yes, of course he is. Where else would he—"

"That's all right, then," Tain said absently, looking about the room and kneading his right wrist with his left hand. He nodded his head distractedly and hefted himself to his feet. He had lost a considerable amount of weight, but he was still on the rotund side for a Cardassian. He had moved nimbly enough before, but now it seemed an effort. He coughed again, a dry and deliberate sound that foiled Julian's reflex to listen for signs of fluid in the lungs, or inflammation, or infection. It sounded more like a voluntary sound, a calculated one, perhaps every bit as pointed as the clearing of the throat that had brought the other two Cardassians to heel.

Tain shuffled over to his cot and shook out the blanket. He eased himself down onto the thin pallet, and the pipe joints creaked in protest as he settled. He spread the coarse cloth over himself, gathering it close with one fist. "Damnably cold in here," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. "Curse the Jem'Hadar and their unnatural metabolism."

Soon he was drawing in the deep, slow breaths of Stage 1 slumber. Julian watched him for a while down the length of his nose, the crown of his head propped against the wall. Finally he bestirred himself, straightening his own blanket and stretching out on a surface that brought no consolation, and precious little comfort beyond the relief of laying down his pulsing head. He shifted and squirmed a little, trying to find a comfortable position. At last, he rolled onto his side, facing into the room. He tugged the thin, scratchy blanket up under his chin and let himself fall away into dark forgetfulness.

( _fade_ )


	3. Make the Best of It

_Note: It is an enduring tragedy for me that despite his many talents, I cannot justify this narrative voice knowing the word "armscye". Oh, tailor, we need you!_

**Part I, Act III: Make the Best of It**

It was thirst that woke him, horrible and maddening thirst. Julian did not struggle towards consciousness or remembrance this time: only groped down over the edge of the cot and felt through the cold air until his fingers closed on the steel canteen. It was still where he had left it when the Jem'Hadar had come to collect him, and it was still half-full. He rolled onto his stomach and propped himself up with his elbows, still half-asleep as he fumbled with the lid of the bottle. He squinted against the dull grey glow of the barracks and drank greedily. After three long swallows he forced himself to stop, remembering belatedly that water was scarce and he would not be given more until mealtime, whenever that was.

He was not sure of the time. He wasn't sure of the date, come to that. He had been complacent in the assumption that he had fallen asleep one night and awakened the following morning halfway across the Galaxy. That was absurd, of course. At high warp, Meezan IV was an eighteen hour journey from Deep Space Nine and the mouth of the wormhole, and there was no telling how far into Dominion space this place was. That raised the ugly spectre of just how long he had been sedated. Julian sighed and scrubbed his face with the heel of his palm. They could have put him in stasis instead. In their place,  _he_  would have put the patient in stasis—

But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Despite Deyos's choice of words, Julian had not been a patient to them, but a prisoner.  _Collections_  even made him sound like a specimen. They had no reason to consider his welfare, if the Dominion's espionage operatives were even capable of grasping the concepts of medical ethics. What did it matter to them if they damaged organs or impaired neural pathways with their drugs? If the withdrawal process was any accurate gauge, they had pumped him full of some very nasty stuff — something that probably would not have met the standards of Starfleet Medical.

He flopped back onto his side as his head began to swim again. There was a tremor in his hands as he hugged the canteen to him and stared across the way at the slumbering bulk of Enabran Tain on the opposite cot. By craning his neck a little, he could see the Breen, still unmoving. And in the bed beyond him was another form, turned in towards the wall. The acute angle of the overstated shoulder pad of the sleeper's jacket betrayed that this was a Romulan — not Major Kalenna, but a male with a thick neck and overgrown hair.

Julian dared to raise his head again, so that he could peer up the length of the row in which he lay. The cot next to his was empty. On the one nearest the door lay the Tal Shiar operative, flat on her back with her hands folded over her diaphragm. She, too, was fast asleep.

It was night, then. Or everyone in the barracks had adopted Enabran Tain's napping schedule, which seemed unlikely. Julian settled again, hitching the blanket higher on his shoulders. He was cold; not quite shivering, but too chilled for comfort. The thin foam pad beneath him didn't provide much of a buffer, and he could feel stripes of pressure all down the length of his body from the webbing beneath. He closed his stinging eyes and focused on his heartbeat. Fifty beats per minute: still far faster than normal.

He could not let go of the idea of deducing what sort of a drug they had given him. Some part of his brain had been keeping a running tally of the symptoms: disorientation, rapid pulse, cognitive stutters, dry mouth — but that last might be simple dehydration, if they hadn't taken steps to prevent it while he was under. He certainly hadn't had enough water to resolve even a small deficit. But the tremors were surely due to the withdrawal, and there was the nausea…

But the nausea had been part of the vasovagal crash in the Vorta's office, and Julian didn't know if that had been facilitated by the chemicals in his blood or a purely physiological response to what he had learned. It was useless, he reflected sourly. He couldn't isolate the causative factor for any of it. A hypospray and a vacutainer and five seconds in the molecular imager would have given him all the answers he needed, but the imager was back in his pristine infirmary on the station, and he doubted the people who took him had thought to bring along his medkit.

He tipped the canteen to his lips and took another swallow of water, almost before he knew he was moving. Annoyed with himself, he screwed the lid back on and thrust the bottle behind him. It hit the bulkhead wall with a dull  _clunk_ , and rolled into the small of his back. He was used to taking water for granted, and from the sound of things that was going to have to change.

Dully, Julian reflected that he should not put too much store in what Deyos had said. The Vorta were far from trustworthy, and anything this one had told him might have been invented to make him more malleable, or in an attempt to break his will, or purely for the pleasure of witnessing his distress. But the difficulty was that there was no other explanation for why he had been taken. His knowledge was of little use strategically, and no use medically. As far as he knew, the Dominion did not indulge in the machinations of ransom or prisoner exchange. If they had not extracted him in order to replace him, thereby gaining access to Deep Space Nine and all of its secure facilities, what was the point of all this effort?

Even if that was the truth, and a Changeling infiltrator was now en route to the station — possibly even arrived already, since Julian had no idea of the Stardate — it did not necessarily follow that the swap would go undetected. The Founders were neither infallible, nor the all-seeing gods the Vorta believed them to be. The one who had impersonated General Martok, one of the most decorated warriors of the Empire, had made an imperfect replacement. He had not been quite Klingon enough, and a slip of the tongue had led to his undoing.

 _A slip of the tongue it took Odo to hear_ , Julian remembered morosely. The Changeling had sustained the charade for a long time: several months at least. During that time he had presumably been living among Martok's soldiers and interacting with Martok's friends… perhaps even his family. It had taken another of his own species (or formerly of his own species, as the Link had stripped Odo of his shape-shifting abilities and left him as solid as the rest of the crew) to see through the veil of deception.

A startled little laugh broke from Julian's lips before he could stifle it with the side of his hand. He grinned against his knuckle, eyes suddenly bright in the gloom. He had been thinking as if that was some kind of a barrier instead of a mark in his favour. Odo was a unique being and an extraordinarily investigator and possibly the only person qualified to spot a Changeling counterfeit, but it wasn't as if he would have to penetrate the heart of the Klingon Empire to come face-to-face with the imposter this time.  _Odo was onboard the station_. He would come in contact with the other Bashir on a daily basis. Surely it wouldn't take long for him to notice something was amiss.

Julian drew his hand over his face, rubbing at his eyes again and then running his palm along his jaw. He tucked up his arm, pillowing his head more comfortably than the inadequate bedding could do. He could be excused for seeing only the worst in his situation earlier, he supposed, but he would have to fight that as assiduously as he had to start conserving water. What was needed now was hope and determination. Rescue would come. It might take some time, but it would come. In the meantime, he had to make the best of his situation.

"Make the best of it," he whispered, as if saying the words aloud would make them more persuasive. The thirst was back already, but he had firmly decided he'd drunk his share until morning. He repeated himself again, a little more forcefully. "Make the best of it."

There was a creak of pipe joints and the low  _scritch_  of canvas. Across the room, sudden motion drew Julian's eyes. The Breen had moved at last, propped up on their elbows with the heavy helmet turned so that the blank visor stared at the noisy human. Julian grimaced apologetically. "Sorry," he mouthed.

The Breen dropped back onto the cot. There was no sound except the protestations of the bunk, but the entire motion had the feel of an exasperated snort. After that, Julian lay quietly until he drifted off to sleep again.

( _fade_ )

The morning's activity woke him next. Major Kalenna was shaking out her uniform tunic while the other Romulan made up her cot with brisk, efficient movements. The Breen was upright for the first time, sitting on the bed instead of lying on it. Tain was nowhere to be seen.

Julian sat up slowly, feeling some residual vertigo but in no further danger of succumbing to it. The tremors were worse, however, and the hand that clenched the pipe frame of the cot was shaking to the elbow. He stared at it ferociously, willing it to stop, but all that his carefully augmented motor neurons could manage was a frequency change. He was still quaking: he was just quaking more slowly.

"Good morning, Lieutenant," said Kalenna, turning to look him over. She gave the tunic a last sharp crack and draped it over her forearm, studying Julian's face intently. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," Julian said. He had never seen a Romulan officer in deshabille before, and he was interested to observe that she wore a singlet not unlike the ones Starfleet issued. He was wearing something very similar himself, if not quite as stained and frayed about the armholes.

Major Kalenna curled her lip, and Bashir looked away, awkwardly conscious of how his line of sight had been interpreted. "Don't concern yourself," she said dryly. "I've been an observer for the Tal Shiar on military vessels for fifteen years. I'm accustomed to curious junior officers."

Julian's cheeks burned. The worst of it was that he couldn't defend himself: he  _had_  been curious. He didn't know much about Romulans, not nearly enough to satisfy an insatiable appetite for knowledge. He'd been looking at her like an alien instead of like a romantic prospect, but was that really any less insulting?

"I expect there aren't many female prisoners here," he muttered uncomfortably, groping for something to say. "I'll try to give you your privacy."

"Privacy is for private citizens," Kalenna said, with the tone of someone repeating an old adage. It didn't sound much like a sentiment espoused by the Tal Shiar. "But you're right. Except perhaps for the Breen, I am the only female remaining on this rock. As you are the only human."

"Why is that?" asked Julian, lifting his eyes again and this time keeping them squarely on target for her face. "I would have thought there would be a few at least. Starfleet has lost ships in the Gamma Quadrant, and if the Founders have infiltrated Earth the same way they—"

He cut himself off, horrified by the indiscretion. That wasn't general knowledge, and he had just announced it to not one, but three foreign stakeholders. There was no way of telling of the Breen was listening, but the Romulan male looked up from straightening his own blanket to stare at Bashir in sudden fascination.

Kalenna curled her lip in a cynical half-smile. "Don't worry, Lieutenant. It's not as if I can report back to the Senate, now is it?"

She was mocking him, and it rubbed him the wrong way. Bristling a little, Julian said tightly; "I would prefer you call me Doctor."

Her oblique eyebrows rose, creasing the skin between her bony brow ridges. "You are a doctor?" she said in mild surprise.

"Of course…" Julian began. But then some part of his brain that had been cataloguing yesterday's interactions with the woman almost without his knowledge spat out the relevant piece of information. He sighed in annoyed realization. "I never did introduce myself."

"You didn't," said Kalenna. Her grim eyes had a glint of mirth in them now.

"And Tain didn't explain," said Julian, putting the last piece of the puzzle together.

"Tain explains nothing," Kalenna said. "He is a blusterer and an equivocator, and he hoards the most insignificant information rather than sharing it."

Julian's medical licence certainly wasn't insignificant to  _him_. "Well, I'm a doctor," he said. "A Chief Medical Officer, actually. Doctor Julian Bashir. So I'd prefer it if you didn't call me Lieutenant."

He was just as proud of his commission as of his profession, and usually the rank didn't trouble him. But it was the way she said it:  _Lieutenant_ , as if all military officers were inherently inferior. He supposed that to the Tal Shiar, they were.

"Very well," said Kalenna. "Doctor."

"Thank you," Julian muttered, though in truth her tone hadn't changed with the honorific. She had done him a kindness yesterday — more than one, in fact — but she certainly wasn't looking at him as an equal.

"They mistreated you during your intake," she observed. The other Romulan cast a last look back before opening the barracks door and scurrying out into the corridor. Julian's eyes tracked him briefly before fixing on the Major again. He frowned perplexedly. "Your face is bruised," Kalenna clarified.

Julian's fingers travelled at once to his left cheekbone, feeling the hard, glossy surface of a superficial hematoma. "Oh, that," he said, and for a moment he could feel the Cardassian on top of him, kneeling on his spine while the other one wrestled with his foot. "I fell. The Vorta didn't mistreat me, but…" He trailed off, knowing this was something else he shouldn't be discussing with all comers. "But they didn't issue me a water ration."

"I surmised as much," said Kalenna. Her glance darted to the head of her cot, where a canteen identical to the one he had given her lay tipped against the wall. "It was perhaps optimistic of me to suggest that they would."

"I'll make it good today," Julian promised. "Out of today's ration."

The Romulan woman made an indifferent sound and turned her back on him. For a moment, he thought that he had somehow offended her, but then she raised her arms and hoisted her tunic over her head. She settled it about her hips and reached for her belt where it lay coiled on one of the benches. Deciding the conversation was over, Julian got cautiously to his feet.

Again, a brief reeling tilt of dizziness. Again, it subsided quickly. Good.

"Make your bed," Kalenna instructed curtly. "The guards inspect the barracks while we're out for the count."

Julian made a quick sweep of the room, taking in the other cots and their perfect, uniform order. With his hands still shaking it took him a couple of attempts to fold his blanket properly, but it didn't take long to get his space looking like all the others. It was considerably easier than policing up his bunk in the Academy's orientation dormitory had been. There, he had been obliged to worry about several layers of bedding, toiletries, spare uniforms, PADDs, a tricorder, personal effects. Here he had the cot, the mattress, the single industrial blanket, and the thin sack of clotted lumps that was supposed to be a pillow. And he had Kalenna's second bottle. He held it out, meaning to return it, but its remaining contents sloshed.

At once his jaw was burning and the back of his throat prickled. He whipped off the cap and raised the vessel to his lips, then froze when he saw the Major watching him.

He forced himself to swallow against the dryness. There wasn't much to drive down. "How long until mealtime?" he asked warily.

"Four hours," said Kalenna. Then she was gone.

Julian stared after her, feeling suddenly cornered. He stared down at the canteen, swirling it and trying to gauge how much water was left. He had no frame of reference, not knowing how much the bottle weighed when empty. Four hours was a long time to go without the prospect of a drink, especially when he had no idea how dehydrated he might be. The first thing Major Kalenna had done was to offer him water, insisting he needed it because of the sedative; a sedative that was still affecting him. But on the other hand, he needed fluids  _now_ , and if he didn't drink that need would get worse, not better, with time.

Decided, he tossed back his head and drained the bottle. There were two decent draughts left, and he shook it to free the last few millilitres. He ran his tongue over his lip, hoarding every drop. Then he stared down at the canteen, weighing it in his hand, taking note of the feel. Next time, he would be able to make a more useful estimate of what he had.

Kalenna's other bottle was now on one of the benches. He put the empty one beside it. Collecting his courage for whatever lay ahead, he tapped the pad beside the door and stepped out of the barracks.

( _fade_ )

A klaxon sounded, four ear-splitting bleats. Julian had just inched around the corner, peering warily into the atrium. Some prisoners were already out there, waiting. More came hurrying from the various side passages. A Cardassian in military armour swept past him. Leaving the prisoners in their own garments made a certain pragmatic sense: it saved the Dominion the resources needed to clothe them. But Julian wondered why they would be allowed to keep rigid protective gear. He doubted the answer would be anything in his favour.

Someone nudged his arm. It was the Romulan male from Barracks 6. "Move along," he hissed. "Get into line and stand at attention."

"Line?" Julian muttered, but then he saw: the chaotically gathering bodies were sorting themselves into two opposing blocks, one down each of the long sides of the atrium. Each block consisted of two lines of prisoners. Most of the population seemed to be trying to keep their distance from the lighted ring near Julian's end of the open space. Likewise, there was fierce competition to be in the rear line on each side. As a result, he found himself standing less than a metre away from the ring, prodded into place by the Romulan, who fell in behind him.

"Stand up straight," the man whispered. Julian shot an appraising look up and down the line and adjusted his position. For a surreal moment he was transported back through time, not just in the scope of his memory but across the century, to a briefing room aboard the most famous of the old Constitution Class starships ever to fly. Then there was a cacophonous hiss of one of the airlock-type doors on the far side of the common space. At least it seemed cacophonous, because it brought perfect silence to the assembled population of the internment camp.

Deyos came strolling out of the administration corridor, First Ikat'ika half a step behind him and four Jem'Hadar with rifles at the ready on either flank. The Vorta had his hands clasped behind his back, and he surveyed the length of the atrium with a supercilious air. "Dress up that line," he said, wafting his right hand — thankfully, at the opposite assembly of prisoners. "Final warning."

There had been no previous warning, but Julian watched in fascinated worry as every body on the other side of the atrium tensed and shifted up to obey. He kept his own shoulders squared, feet planted neatly, hands at his side and face properly front, but he let his eyes travel. Cardassians, at least half a dozen of them that he could see without turning. A smattering of Romulans. He thought he recognized a Hunter, and a handful of other Gamma Quadrant species he had encountered over the years. As Tain had said, there seemed to be no other Federation citizens. Julian felt a pang of desolation at the idea that he was all alone, and immediately repented of it. He would not wish this fate on any of his compatriots.

Deyos was moving up the previously derelict line now, counting off by twos. Ikat'ika bobbed his head tightly with each number, confirming his own tally. The other Jem'Hadar fixed each prisoner in turn with a steely, threatening stare.

When they reached the end, Deyos turned, cocked his head thoughtfully to one side, and stepped over the low lip into the lighted ring. He sauntered across it, leaving perfectly crisp prints in the dust. Julian had expected the Jem'Hadar to follow him in formation, as they had until that moment. Instead, Ikat'ika gestured to his men and then led the righthand quartet around the top of the ring. The other four rounded it from the other direction. They fell into step behind the Vorta again just as he stopped in front of Julian.

"Good morning, Doctor," he said silkily. "I hope you're enjoying your stay with us."

A clever retort wanted to rise to Julian's lips, but in the millisecond it took to think of one, common sense prevailed. "I'm finding my way," he said instead, sensing it would be dangerous to ignore the remark entirely.

"Good.  _Good_ ," said Deyos. He gasped theatrically and snapped his fingers. "Look at that: I've lost count." he said. He smiled chillingly, staring right into Julian's eyes as he said, " _Two_."

( _fade_ )

The Vorta "lost count" twice more before finally making a perfect circuit. By that time, Julian's hyperextended knee was throbbing and the dizziness had returned. Nor was he the only one who was feeling the worse for the delay: when at last the Vorta and his escort dispersed, the Jem'Hadar moving to take up positions around the atrium while Deyos disappeared towards his office, most of the prisoners slouched, sagged, or stretched as soon as they dared.

Julian was feeling another sort of discomfort as well, and he took a couple of not-quite-limping steps towards Enabran Tain, who had materialized out of the shadows just in time for the count and was now looking around like an aristocrat surveying his pet garden. Julian closed his eyes for a moment, grappling with the embarrassment of having to ask this question of a man who had once told him that death was too good for his friend. When he opened them again, resolved, Tain was gone.

The prisoners were dispersing rapidly, some gathering in small knots around the atrium while others retreated into the barracks pods. Julian turned in a full circle, looking bewilderedly for the aging Cardassian. As he completed his arc, he was startled to find that Kalenna had crept up on him and was now standing less than a hand's breadth from his shoulder. Julian gasped, but she only looked at him dispassionately.

"What are you looking for, Doctor?" she asked.

Julian twisted at the waist, pointing over his shoulder at the place he had last seen Tain. "I…" Then he thought how pointless it was to even raise the matter of the Cardassian's rapid disappearance, when his location was only a means to an end.

"I was… is there somewhere I can…" It was absurd that he was having trouble saying this. He was a grown man, a Starfleet officer, and a damned  _doctor_. But everything about this place was designed to make him feel that he had no control, and his understandable ignorance now felt like helplessness. It was humiliating to be unable to simply take care of the imperatives of life without having to ask.

Julian closed his eyes again, briefly, and drew in a deep breath. "I need to relieve myself," he said.

There was a moment of perplexed silence as either the Universal Translator or Kalenna herself tried to parse the euphamism. Then she nodded understanding. "The door at the far end of each barracks pod," she said. "Stay alert. There is always someone looking to deprive new prisoners of anything useful, and that is an unobtrusive place to do it."

She scarcely needed to warn him about  _that_. Julian shuffled off awkwardly, trying to keep an even gait. He supposed his knee had swollen overnight, in addition to the recent strain of standing too long at attention. By the time he reached the back of the pod, having passed the doors of the other five barracks in it as well as his own, he had given up the effort not to limp.

The room was an arc, one straight inner wall with the curve of the end of the pod intersecting it on both sides. There were half a dozen waste reclamation units, unfamiliar in design but clear enough in function, and that was all: no partitions for modesty, no sinks, no shower units, sonic or otherwise, none of the niceties that made such spaces convenient and comfortable elsewhere in the Galaxy. Like the rest of the place, it was dingy and poorly lit. There were seepage stains on the walls, almost identical to the ones in Barracks 6, and patches of discolouration blossomed on the floor around each toilet unit. The room had a strong amoniac odour that Julian did not want to think too hard about.

He didn't want to think too hard about any of it, frankly, and he hastened to unfasten the relevant parts of his uniform. He took care of his needs as quickly as he could. It was too dark to get a look at his urine, which might have helped him to a better understanding of just what his body was going through as it fought off the drugs, but the smell was strong and concentrated. Only once he had his garments back in place and had fumbled his way around the controls with their Dominionese markings did Julian really process the fact that he couldn't see anywhere to wash his hands.

He stood helplessly in the middle of the foul room, paralyzed by an ingrained rebellion against the very idea of neglecting this essential task. He wasn't unduly fastidious. He had a high tolerance for grime in the ordinary course of things, and was never afraid to get himself dirty in the service of some important effort. But he was a doctor, a surgeon, and to fail to  _wash his hands_ after taking care of excretory functions was tantamount to heresy.

But what choice did he have? The helplessness washed over him again, frigid and horrible. He tried to walk away, but he could not move. He closed his eyes. He had to make the best of it. He had to make the best of it. He had to keep faith in the idea that this was only temporary. The truth would come out, and help would come, but only if he made the best of it.

The door barked open. If anyone had been using the two middle units, they would have been exposed to the length of the corridor and the segment of atrium beyond it. A Cardassian, shorter than most of his compatriots and stocky of bone if no longer of flesh, shuffled in. He stole a glance at Julian and slid past him cautiously. Tain's words to the two who had tried to steal his boots echoed in Julian's mind:  _The human is under my protection. See that is generally known._

Courtesy demanded that if he was finished in here he should leave, and allow the other man what privacy he could, but Julian could not quite figure out how to make his body do it. It was as if the habit of cleaning his hands was so deeply ingrained that he did not know how to move on to the next task without completing it.

At least his back was turned, and the Cardassian did not seem to have any compunctions about the company. Soon he was on his feet again. He looked at the human again, puzzled this time, but did not dare to comment. He moved towards the door, but then stepped past it. Perplexed, Julian saw that there was a slot in the wall, like the mouth of a replicator but less than half the size. Above it was a small control panel and a display screen. The Cardassian thumbed one of the icons and thrust both hands into the slot. It hummed to life, glowed briefly, and then subsided into its former dormant state. With one last glance at Julian, the other man left the room.

Feeling like a fool, Julian approached the niche. It must be some sort of disinfection unit: ultraviolet, maybe, or sonic. He supposed it also might employ some sort of harmful radiation, but he was willing to take his chances with that. He pressed the same symbol the Cardassian had used, and slipped his hands inside. His skin tingled for a moment as the glow intensified and then faded. It wasn't a painful feeling; only somewhat unpleasant, like reaching into a drawer filled with something prickling and clammy.

He withdrew his hands and looked at them. There was no visible difference, of course. He would just have to trust that the device did what it seemed to be designed to do. Julian supposed it stood to reason that the Dominion would want its prisoners to be able to sterilize. The alternative was risking an outbreak of Rakhari cholera or any one of a thousand other diseases that spread where sanitation was inadequate to prevent fecal-oral microbial transmission.

It was logical, but he was still not truly at ease. He put his hands through the cycle again before leaving the room. He was going to make the best of it.

 _Well, you've learned what a Dominion toilet looks like, anyway_ , he thought sardonically.  _Won't Starfleet Intelligence be pleased?_

_(fade)_


	4. Mealtime

**Part I, Act IV: Mealtime**

The Breen was back on the cot again, leaning against the wall. There was no sign of Tain or Kalenna, but the male Romulan was sitting on one of the benches, digging in one of his boots. As Julian entered, his expression of pained effort faded to one of grim accomplishment, and he withdrew his hand. He looked up at the new prisoner warily.

"We haven't been properly introduced. I'm Doctor Julian Bashir, Chief Medical Officer of Deep Space Nine."

"Sub-Lieutenant Parvok," said the Romulan. "Formerly of the warbird  _Torol_. I suppose you could call me the Major's attaché now."

"Did she serve on the  _Torol_  as well?" Julian asked, trying to make conversation. The narrow-eyed glare the other man gave him made him think better of it. Relations were strained between Romulus and the Federation — they had been for centuries. Asking about officer assignments wasn't small talk in that context, but intelligence-gathering. "Never mind. I don't suppose it matters very much."

"Nothing matters here," said Parvok bitterly. He drew up his knee and put his boot back on. "You'll learn that soon enough."

"You've been here for almost two years," said Julian. "I'd welcome any advice you have to offer."

Parvok made a low, disgusted noise. "Keep your head down," he said. "Don't make eye contact with the guards. If they look like they're on the hunt, they are."

"On the hunt for what?" asked Julian.

The other man's gaze slid away. "You'll see. Why do you think there are so few of my people left?"

"I don't know; why don't you tell me?" Julian couldn't quite keep the annoyance from his voice. He was trying to get a sense of what he was up against here, and people kept evading his questions.

Parvok got stiffly to his feet and hurried over to his bunk. He climbed onto it, crossing his legs so that he could face the wall as he sat. The skittishness of his movements and the way his shoulders slumped even under the broad pads gave him the look of a harried animal. Julian felt a stab of pity and an accompanying pang of self-disgust for having griped at the man. His lips twitched in the prelude to an apology, but he was reluctant to open his impetuous mouth again.

He went to the low table farthest inside the room and sat down on the corner, hitching one hip higher than the other so that his right foot dangled free. He was unwilling to undress just at present: removing any part of his uniform would feel a little too much like giving in to his circumstances. So Julian palpated his knee through the cloth of his trouser leg. It was indeed moderately inflamed, but the patella was still properly mobilized and he couldn't detect any sign of luxation. The meniscus seemed to be intact.

He had no way of assessing for torn ligaments without a tricorder. He had none of the tools that would have simplified this examination, in fact. He checked his reflex by thumping himself with the side of his fifth metacarpal, a sharp and purposeful movement that brought the desired knee-jerk response but also made him draw in a harsh breath at the jab of pain. Gnawing his lip, Julian kneaded the joint gently in an attempt to ease his discomfort.

"I don't suppose we have any compression bandages?" he asked, calling the question up the length of the room towards Parvok. "Or any dressings at all? Some gauze, a strip of bedsheet, anything?"

There was a moment's sullen silence before Parvok said; "That's right."

Julian was nonplussed. "What?" It was almost a hiccup.

"You're right," Parvok repeated coldly, enunciating a little more fiercely than was strictly necessary. "We don't have any of that. Unless you want to tear up your clothes or your blanket."

Julian glanced over his shoulder towards his neatly-made cot. "No," he muttered to himself. "No, I don't want to do that." Not for a strained knee, anyway. It might have been a different matter if he had been dealing with an open wound. That thought made him queasy. Without ready access to medical supplies, just what was he supposed to do if someone got seriously injured?

"What is the infirmary like?" he asked. "Is it well stocked? Is there a Vorta doctor, or do the Jem'Hadar attend to the prisoners?" Somehow he could not imagine Deyos fulfilling that role himself.

Parvok twisted to stare at him, angled brows furrowed. "Infirmary?" he echoed.

"Sick bay," Julian tried, in case the Universal Translator was having trouble finding the right synonym. "Clinic, field hospital."

The Romulan snorted. "There's nothing like that here," he said.

"That's ridiculous: there must be," scoffed Julian, righteously indignant. "You can't herd together two hundred people in less than a hectare of enclosed space and expect them to do without a hospital facility. And denying medical care to prisoners of war is prohibited by—"

He stopped. He'd heard himself. He didn't need the Romulan to tell him what a colossal idiot he was being. He clapped a hand to the back of his neck, scrubbing at it in a vain attempt to ease his agitation with motion.

"Federation credulity," sneered Parvok tiredly. "That is what's wrong with your people. You ascribe your ridiculous high-minded ideals to everyone around you, with no consideration that the Universe  _doesn't work that way_. I suppose you expect the Dominion to send Starfleet an official notice of capture, too? And ship your body back to your family when you finally die here?"

"No." It was barely a whisper. Julian felt sick, his stomach like a pit of darkness under his ribs and his skin crawling with cold dejection. It wasn't despair. He promised himself it wasn't despair.

"You haven't even paused to consider that, questions of differing philosophy aside, you can't be a prisoner of war because  _there is no war_ ," Parvok mocked. "Or has that changed since the joint fleet fell?"

Julian opened his mouth to protest angrily that of course he was a prisoner of war… but he couldn't. Because the Romulan was right: there had been no formal exchange of declarations between the Dominion and the Federation. There was only the long, slow erosion of a cold clash of irreconcilable philosophies, flaring up now and then in what amounted to border skirmishes — more often than not involving the  _Defiant_  and her crew. It seemed like war to him because he had been serving on the threshold of the only gate through which the two powers could strike at each other.

It didn't matter anyhow. When you were going up against an enemy who did not respect the conventions and codes of conduct that had governed interstellar conflicts in the Alpha Quadrant for two centuries, the distinction between a criminal, a prisoner of war, and an illegal detainee blurred very rapidly. The fact was that they were being held in secret, their comrades at home not even aware that they were alive — or, in Julian's case, missing at all. The Dominion could do whatever it wanted with them, and neglecting to provide the barest standard of care was quite likely to be the least of it.

"So there's no medical facility at all," Julian said slowly, trying to drive back all the rest of the horrific implications and to focus on something that might be at least plausibly construed as a routine part of his job.

Parvok blinked at him incredulously, still twisted awkwardly and staring back over his shoulder. Then he shook his head as if conceding that there was no accounting for humans. "There must be some supplies or tools in the camp," he said. "The Jem'Hadar have some means of repairing minor wounds to themselves. And they can intervene with a wounded prisoner when it suits their… purposes. But I've only seen them do that once."

"When was that?" asked Julian. This was good. His professional instincts were taking over, the competent physician overriding the frightened young man inside. He had to assess the situation, understand its limitations, know when he might be able to count on those in power to intervene and the point up to which he would be on his own.

"About a year ago," said Parvok. He turned back into a more natural position, hiding his face from the other man. "I don't want to think about it."

"The more I know, the more I can do to help," Julian reasoned. "I have experience treating more than just my own kind, you know. Perhaps I can do some good here."

Parvok said nothing. He didn't have to say anything. His silence was eloquent enough.

_Federation credulity._

( _fade_ )

Julian had rolled his blanket around the miserable little cushion, fashioning a makeshift bolster so that he could elevate his knee. The cot had just enough give to it that it sank beneath the concentrated pressure, and so he had settled on the bench instead, lying flat on his back and staring up at the bolts in the ceiling while his feet dangled off the edge. It wasn't the most comfortable position, but he was already beginning to feel the improvement in the joint when the barracks door slid open and Kalenna swooped in.

"Fifteen minutes until mealtime," she said briskly. "Sub-Lieutenant, show the doctor where to go."

"Tain gave me the grand tour yesterday," Julian said, easing his head back onto his crossed arms and enjoying the small pleasure of letting the muscles of his neck relax. "Where is he? I haven't seen him since the count."

"It is not my business to keep track of the Cardassian," the Major said, a little too coldly. Julian quirked his lip, puzzled. Had he said something to offend her? "Go with Sub-Lieutenant Parvok. He will explain what's expected."

It wasn't worth arguing. He hadn't exactly started off on good terms with any of his cellmates, if you didn't count Tain's false amiability, and Julian didn't want to antagonize them any further. He sat up with a soft grunt of effort, relieved when his head swam only a little, and slid the padded roll out from under his leg so that he could stand.

"Are they going to do another inspection?" he asked, nodding at the bundle in his hands. "Or can I leave the bed for now."

Her expression was unreadable. "Do what you wish. They only inspect once a day."

He might have been imagining the disapproval in her tone, but he yielded to it anyway. Trying to keep his weight off of his right leg, he made up the bed again. Parvok was waiting by the door when he finished.

"This way," he said.

Julian followed him, not in the least surprised when they stopped several metres short of the passage Tain had pointed out the day before.

"It's better not to get too close until the sound the alarm," Parvok muttered out of the corner of his mouth. "We're forbidden from forming a line until then, and if they think we have they'll break it up."

Julian observed that the others in the atrium were hanging back in clusters, all stealing glances towards the mess area while trying to look like they were doing nothing of the sort. He recognized that look in their eyes — the eyes of those whose species had irises and pupils of the sort he was accustomed to reading, anyway. He had seen it in the eyes of Terran slaves on the other side of the looking-glass. He had seen it in the eyes of Sanctuary District residents in the dark days before the dawn of the Federation. He had seen it in the eyes of refugees and survivors on a handful of different planets. It was the look of wary longing and desperation particular to sustained, gnawing hunger.

If he was stuck here long enough, he supposed he'd wear that look in his own eyes, too.

"Was it really necessary to come out here a quarter of an hour early?" he mumbled, the words vacant of any true complaint or interest. He was studying the other prisoners, noticing how the neck-bones on some of the Cardassians stuck out starkly enough to cast shadows. A Romulan with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. An alien of a species unknown to him, who was wringing hands with fingers thin as twigs. That might be nothing more than genetic variance between homonoid bipeds, but Julian didn't think so. He thought of Tain's shrunken frame. If even the great Enabran Tain had shed flesh in this place, the spectre of starvation could not be far off.

"The Major's orders," said Parvok. With a surprising lilt of irony, he added; "You don't contradict the Tal Shiar."

Julian was frozen for a moment, but then he chuckled. "I didn't realize Romulans had a sense of humour," he teased.

Parvok rolled his eyes ever so slightly. It wouldn't have read as mock exasperation on a human: it wasn't pronounced enough. But on a person who had grown up in a culture of constant surveillance, it was practically a caricature. Romulans didn't suppress and sublimate emotions like the Vulcans did, but a domineering government had ways of encouraging  _appropriate_  emotions — which this was not. Julian found himself grinning appreciatively. He was about to speak when the alarm sounded.

It was the same one that had heralded the count, but this time it bleated only twice. Before the first pulse began to die away, the scramble to form a line had begun. Julian was jostled by one of the other Romulans, and drove his foot against the floor in order to keep from stumbling. It was one of those movements that would have been perfectly natural and perfectly harmless in ordinary circumstances, but it was too much for the inflamed joint and Julian bit off a yelp of pain. Parvok's eyes darted over his face, but he was already herding the doctor into the queue, just as anxious for the meal as everyone else.

Julian fell into place, bending over and bracing his left hand on his good knee while the right massaged the bad one. He wished he had a compression dressing. He wished a lot of damned things.

The Cardassian who had lined up behind him suddenly stepped back, forcing the man behind  _him_  to do the same. Despite the haste and the occasional careless collision, no one was shoving or trying to budge in out of turn. And the one person who was bold enough to cut the line didn't need violence to do it: Enabran Tain slid into the gap and grinned down at Julian.

"Are you all right, Doctor? You look a little off-colour," he said jovially, tugging his sleeve so Julian took an awkward step nearer. Then he turned and waved the other Cardassian back another step. "My dear," he said, gesturing that Kalenna should step in between the doctor and Parvok.

"No, please, Major, I insist," the Sub-Lieutenant muttered deferentially, giving up his place as well.

Julian was still staring at Tain, his breath ragged as he tried to compartmentalize the pain. "Where have you been?" he asked. "You disappeared after they were done counting us."

"I had business to attend to," Tain sang out, chuckling to show that it was all so very inconsequential. But Julian noticed he hadn't declaimed this as loudly as he did everything else he had to say, and there was an elusiveness to his eye movements.

Among his own people, Julian was very good at reading emotions on the face. Often he could extrapolate things from the tiniest microexpressions that he doubted even the speaker knew he or she was projecting. He'd been well into his twenties before he comprehended that other humans didn't share this particular talent, at least not in such an astute form. But Cardassians eluded him. Or Garak did, certainly. He didn't suppose he could expect Garak's indomitable mentor to be any easier to read. Still, something was off here. Tain was hiding something.

The line was moving forward, slowly and stiltedly. Julian had to take two steps on a leg now pulsing with pain. But Tain was watching him, piercing eyes assessing his every movement. He didn't want to show pain, or to let the dangerous man understand the extent of his vulnerability. He straightened his back and fixed his face in a neutral expression, and took the steps with only the tiniest jerk of avoidance as he put down his foot.

"Good, Doctor: very good," said Tain with almost proprietary approval. "Doesn't do to show weakness. The Jem'Hadar can smell it. They don't eat or drink, so they say, but they hunger for any hint of frailty."

He clapped Julian on the shoulder, and the doctor had to fight the urge to flinch away. His skin was crawling beneath his uniform. He knew that the phenomenon that humans called  _the creeps_  was a medically documented response to an instinctive threat or the presence of a psychopath. In Tain's case, he feared there was both.

The mess line was a perfect example of Dominion efficiency, moving swiftly and without pause or interruption. At least, Julian thought it was a perfect example of Dominion efficiency until he got close enough to the head of it to see what was being served.

They used the ore conveyor as a table, four Jem'Hadar standing behind it at wide intervals while half a dozen more stood on the other side of the queue of prisoners, their rifles at the ready. The first station was water, and that exchange ran almost mechanically: each prisoner handed over his two bottles, and collected two more that were laid out in precise rows on the ribbed belt. The Jem'Hadar who took the empty vessels passed them off to the guard on his right, who packed them away in grey crates to be refilled for tomorrow. All of that was much like what Julian had been expecting, but the third Jem'Hadar gave him pause.

This one was thrusting plates at the prisoners with the mechanized precision of an industrial dispenser. Empty plates, or rather shallow pans with a ridged lip. There were stacks of these dishes in front of the Jem'Hadar soldier. Stacks of empty plates that had to be filled one at a time by the fourth guard. He was scooping up measures of something unidentifiable and plopping one onto each plate as the prisoner held it out. The food was in long, squat trays, and the Jem'Hadar was using a ladle with a broad, low bowl and a short handle. Julian stared in astonishment. This couldn't be the most efficient way to feed two hundred people. The last time he'd seen a system for food distribution this repetitive and imprecise had been in…

Sanctuary District A.

Someone nudged him in the ribs. He glanced back warily to find Enabran Tain grinning at him. Ahead, the gap between Julian and Parvok was almost a metre and a half. He hastened to close it, just as the Romulan tucked his two fresh bottles of water into the crook of his arm and shuffled ahead towards the Jem'Hadar with the plates.

Julian reached for the next two bottles in the dwindling row. The first Jem'Hadar behind the table seized his right wrist, gripping it with bone-grinding force and fixing him with the look of cold hatred his people always seemed to wear.

"Where are your bottles, prisoner?" he demanded, his voice stonily automatic.

"I don't have any," said Julian. He was careful to keep his own voice firm, even though he could feel his radius creeping along the scaphoid joint capsule and his fear was mounting. "I was brought here yesterday, after mealtime. I haven't been issued any water yet."

"Prisoners do not receive a water ration unless they return their bottles," the Jem'Hadar recited. He sounded like a holorecording.

"I haven't been given any bottles," Julian rephrased. His tone was getting harder as his anxiety mounted. The part of his brain that liked to analyze every situation for every possible outcome was churning out some very unencouraging projections for the ways this encounter would end. "I need you to issue me some."

The grip on his wrist tightened from uncomfortable to painful. The bones ground against his ulnar nerve, and his last two fingers went numb. His nailbeds went rapidly purple as his veins were squeezed shut. Julian set his back teeth and kept a steady, rational gaze on the Jem'Hadar.

Tain was at his shoulders, his own bottles ready to hand off. Julian half-expected him to speak up and defuse the situation, but of course he did not. He had been very clear: the Cardassian captives might fear him, but he could not protect the doctor from the Jem'Hadar.

"You have no  _needs_ , prisoner," the guard recited, passionless contempt spitting like venom from his grey lips. "You make no  _demands_. You simply obey."

His arm was shaking now, the withdrawal tremors aggravated by the pressure on his nerves and the deepening pain. Julian's lips spasmed tautly as he said tightly; "It's not a demand, it's only the truth. I haven't been issued any bottles."

"What is the delay?" a deep voice demanded, sternly robotic. Another Jem'Hadar strode up behind Julian, heavy boots thudding on the stone floor. "The line is interrupted."

It was the First, Itak'Ika. He glowered up the conveyor, where far ahead, Parvok was receiving his measure of whatever the last of the servers was doling out. Then he fixed his stare on the Jem'Hadar holding Julian.

"This prisoner has not returned his bottles," the guard said stiffly, but the hatred in his voice wavered slightly with uncertainty.

Ikat'ika was unimpressed. "All were informed of the new prisoner in the compound: a human. It is your responsibility to issue the initial bottles to the new prisoners."

"I could not be sure this was the correct human, First," the Jem'Hadar said, still barking out the words as if giving a rote report. "I needed to verify that the prisoner was not lying. Hoarding of drinking vessels is strictly prohibited."

For a moment, Julian felt a spark of guilty hope: if the guard suspected he might not be the "correct" human, did that mean he wasn't the only one after all? But then he understood that it was no more than a pretext.

The grip on his wrist released so suddenly that his hand fell towards the conveyor. He drew it hurriedly in towards his chest, rubbing at his wrist to restore circulation. The guard on the other side of the conveyor bared his teeth at Julian, and then reached to take the canteens from Tain.

First Ikat'ika picked up two full bottles and thrust them at Julian. He grabbed one awkwardly with his left hand and juggled it into the crook of his other arm so that he could take the second.

"Now  _move_ ," Ikat'ika demanded. "You are obstructing the line."

Julian obeyed, his spine taut as a piano wire and thrumming with adrenaline. The litany of worst-case scenarios was still running through his brain. Sometimes he wished he had a little more control over that corner of his mind.

There was more fumbling to do when he reached the next Jem'Hadar, because he didn't trust his right hand to grip either the plate or the canteen reliably. He used his arm instead, pinning both bottles against his body, and took the dish with his left hand. He didn't even take in the sight of the food that was sloshed into it by the fourth soldier, and he limped hurriedly away from the line, giving the last of the armed escort a wide berth as he went.

He looked around, utterly lost. He had expected to see tables and benches, or maybe upturned crates or cargo containers or stools —  _some_  kind of furniture, purpose-built or makeshift, for the prisoners to sit on while they ate. There was nothing: only an open space with bare composite stone flooring. Scattered across it in small, random knots were the prisoners, sitting on the hard floor with their plates in their laps, bent low over their meal. Julian tried to pick out his cellmates from the crowd, but his vision was obscured at the edges and blurred by the surfeit of epinephrine. All the bowed dark heads and grey garments ran together.

"This way," Tain grunted, sidling past him. Julian followed mutely, hugging the canteens tightly to his chest and trying to keep his plate balanced. Sitters leaned away as Tain passed, but straightened almost immediately afterwards so that Julian had to navigate carefully to avoid barking his bad knee against a spine or an armoured shoulder. They did not stop until they reached what Julian understood at once to be the best spot in the room: the rear corner of the mess, farthest from the conveyor and the Jem'Hadar. The two walls met, so they could sit along the L and each of them could lean back and rest. The other prisoners had left a wide arc of floor bare in that corner, reluctant to draw too near to what was clearly Enabran Tain's territory.

The two Romulans were already seated, and the Breen stood over them, arms crossed. Two bottles sat beside one of their boots, but they carried no plate. Julian supposed it was impossible to eat without removing the atmospheric helmet — and then realized he wasn't even sure if Breen had mouths.

Tain thrust his plate downward, and Parvok took it, holding it carefully aloft while the Cardassian set down his canteens and levered himself to the floor with a grunt.

"I'm too old for picnics," he groused theatrically, taking back his dish; "but it's uncouth to eat on your feet, so what's a man to do? Sit down, Doctor. You're making me nervous."

There was certainly no way that could be true, but Julian moved to obey. For a moment or two he was at a loss as to how to accomplish the manoeuvre, with both arms full, one bad leg and a throbbing hand. He lowered himself into a slow, one-legged squat, letting his right knee bend gently as he went but keeping well off the knee. He set down the plate, and it clattered a little as he got his fingers out from under it. Then he put down the bottles and grabbed his trouser leg to guide his aggrieved limb as he eased himself the rest of the way down, keeping it almost straight as he went. He slumped gratefully against the wall and let out a heavy breath.

"I thought they might shoot you," Parvok whispered.

"The worst they would have done is break his arm," Major Kalenna argued dispassionately. She had one of her canteens in her hand, and she took a long swallow. Her eyes fluttered closed in momentary relish, and Julian remembered his debt.

"Here," he said, holding out one of his bottles across Tain's lap. The Cardassian seemed mildly surprised by this casual invasion of his airspace, but he snorted amusedly and busied himself with his own water.

Kalenna looked at the bottle thoughtfully. For an ignoble moment, Julian almost believed she was going to tell him to keep it. His thirst was intensifying at the sounds of drinking all around him. The thought of going another twenty-six hours — twenty four? twenty-eight? Just how long  _was_ a Dominion Standard Day? — with only a litre of water to get him through it was not a happy prospect.

"Give it to me once we're in the barracks," Kalenna said. "If the guards see me carrying three bottles, I'll be punished."

Julian nodded wordlessly. He set the canteen aside and opened the other one, bracing it in the crook of his right arm. He let himself have a small sip to wet his mouth, and then forced himself to wait for a count of thirty before he took a proper swallow. Coppery and faintly foul, the water still tasted better than he could have imagined. He forced himself to put the bottle down, and dragged the plate into his lap.

He had been served what looked like half a kilogram of a lumpy paste, oozing slowly out of the rounded mound it had been in when the Jem'Hadar guard had tipped it out of his ladle. Its foundation appeared to be some sort of stewed cereal grain of the most unappetizing grey imaginable. Dark flecks about four millimetres across were stirred in thickly throughout, and there were a few small, wrinkled brown seeds that looked like — but surely could not possibly be — Earth peppercorns. The whole mixture had a gelatinous texture and a faint, oily sheen. It also had no identifiable odour.

Julian stared at it, sickened, but now that he had taken the edge off his thirst he was able to feel his hunger. His stomach churned demandingly, and it occurred to him for the first time that fasting might be just as much a part of his recent tremors as the withdrawal was. There was no telling when he had last consumed anything of caloric value. If he couldn't trust that his abductors had administered fluids, he couldn't trust that they had given him nutrients, either.

But the slop had the consistency of thick porridge and it was settling into the form of its container with geological slowness: he couldn't drink it from the edge of the bowl.

"I didn't take any utensils," he muttered, chiding himself for the oversight.

Tain looked at him quizzically, and Julian saw too late that the Cardassian had his hand halfway to his mouth, three fingers cupped under a glob of the unappetizing mush.

"There are no  _utensils_ , Doctor!" he chortled, shaking his head as if the human's naiveté was positively delightful. "Too easy to smuggle them off and hide them. You can kill a man with a good spoon, you know." This last was delivered with the relish of a man imparting the ancient wisdom of worlds.

Julian doubted that, but it wasn't polite to contradict one's host, was it? He looked at the two Romulans, who were also scooping up their food with their fingers. Neither of them returned his gaze: they were watching their plates.

Awkwardly, uncomfortably aware that Enabran Tain was watching his every move, Julian fished in his dish with the first two fingers of his left hand. He didn't raise them to his lips, however. He smeared a trail of the stuff towards the rim of the plate and isolated one of the dark flecks. He plucked it up between thumb and forefinger and examined it more closely. It was some kind of split legume with spiral stippling on the convex side. That was protein accounted for, then, though he had no way of knowing whether this lentil-like thing contained all of the essential amino acids needed by a human body.

"Do they serve the same thing every day?" Julian asked, knowing the answer and dreading it at the same time.

"Every damnable day," Tain agreed philosophically. "Seems to be fortified with something or other. Pity it's not more flavourful."

Julian plucked up a glob of the stuff and forced himself to pop it into his mouth. It was every bit as bland as it looked and smelled. It had a faint boiled flavour, and he could taste the slight sourness of the oil. It had been sparingly salted as well, but without any herb or spice or aromatic vegetable to offset it that was almost worse than no taste at all. The legumes were overboiled and soft: they disintegrated under his teeth. The round things didn't, but they certainly didn't have the satisfying crunch or the rich flavour of peppercorns: they gave way in a mushy, spongy way. It took an effort to swallow instead of spitting the stuff out again, and Julian wished he were a bit more of a spendthrift in nature, so that he could justify rinsing his mouth.

"You have to eat it," Kalenna warned.

"I know," Julian muttered sourly. "Got to keep up my strength."

"The Jem'Hadar will beat you if they think you're on a hunger strike," the woman corrected flatly.

That prospect did nothing to improve his appetite, but Julian made himself swallow another mouthful. There was an aftertaste, he noticed: subtle, but sharp and rancid and sulfurously sweet. It was a very distinctive taste, and he recognized it immediately: thiamine. So their jailers were indeed fortifying the food, but that didn't explain the delivery system.

"I don't understand," Julian said. "I would have thought the Dominion would use some kind of survival ration. Something that could be mass-produced and stored indefinitely. This isn't a very efficient way to feed a population this size."

This time, Tain didn't answer. He was gazing thoughtfully off into the middle distance, spooning the mush to his mouth with a practiced yet dreamy precision. Kalenna looked up from her plate, and shook her head.

"You can hoard survival rations," she said. "Palm them, pocket them, hide them in your boot. Even if they collected the wrappers at the end of every meal, someone would still secret away their share. And they're easy for one prisoner to steal from another. Or people would trade them. And soon this place would have a black market currency. If you are running a prison camp, the last thing you want is an illicit economy."

"But what would anyone buy?" asked Julian. "I can't imagine there's anybody outside foolish enough to try to smuggle contraband into this place under the noses of the Jem'Hadar."

Kalenna shrugged. "Services. Favours. Spare pieces of clothing. Perhaps even assassination attempts. But that isn't the point. An economy is interesting. Engaging. Stimulating to the mind. They don't want us to have anything to invest our intellects in. They want to keep us apathetic: all the truly great prisons have the same goal. Boredom is a weapon to the guards, just as much as the rifles or the knives or their fists. Better, because boredom breaks spirits, not bones."

A shiver ran up Julian's spine.  _Spirits, not bones_. All his life he'd had a dismally low tolerance for boredom. He wondered how long he could endure an environment designed to wage war on his brain as well as his soul and his body.

He shoved that thought away. For the moment, at least, he had plenty to occupy his time. There were countless questions to answer, and vital information to collect. First, though, he had to finish his meal, such as it was. He scooped up another fingerful of glop. He couldn't bear to think of it as porridge, which conjured up memories of breakfast with the O'Brien family: cream and a drizzle of honey, crushed walnuts and fresh icoberries. Keiko was a gracious hostess, and Miles was always particularly cheerful in the morning, even if he didn't do much talking while he ate. Molly had grown out of the phase where she liked to play with her food, and now she asked piercing, candid questions instead. Answering them was unexpectedly delightful.

The vividness of the happy recollection shrivelled in a hot, horrible instant. Julian's throat closed and his hand froze halfway to the plate. Would the Changeling take his place at that table? He had been thinking of the damage his replacement could do in Ops, or in the conduits that serviced the station's sensitive systems: weapons, deflectors, security, life support. It had not occurred to him that a Founder could wreak just as much damage in the homes of his friends.

He shoved the plate off of his lap. It rattled on the floor, spinning through three full turns like a lopsided top winding down, but it did not spill.

"I can't," he choked, climbing to his feet and ignoring the twinge in his knee as he did so. He was staring off blankly into nothing, and seeing the people he had left behind, unknowing with a predator in their midst. He had to get out of here. If he couldn't escape right in this instant — and even in his dismay he understood rationally that he couldn't — at least he could get away from all these people, all these strangers with their dead eyes and their singleminded focus on their food. He could stride off up the length of the atrium. It would make him feel as if he could do  _something_ , at least. He couldn't sit here helplessly.

But before he could take his first step, a broad, hard hand took hold of his uniform at the hip. He was dragged back down, none too gently, and he had just enough sense to keep his right knee from bending to its limit as he went. His tailbone cracked hard against the floor, jolting him out of his blind irrationality.

"Fine," said Tain, glaring at him. His voice was harder than Julian had ever heard it, with none of the false levity. "Just this once, we'll cover for you. But you're not going anywhere until the Jem'Hadar dismiss us. I won't allow it, Doctor. Do you understand me?"

Julian didn't understand, not exactly, but he was in no condition to argue. And addled though his thoughts were, he had the feeling that he was in greater danger now than he had been at any time since returning to his lodgings on Meezan IV. He nodded his head rapidly and unsteadily.

"Then sit still and keep your mouth shut!" Tain snapped. He released his hold on Julian with a snort of disgust, and leaned over to snatch the plate out of Parvok's hand. It was already all but empty, with only a few flecks of stewed grain and a smear of starchy oil remaining. With a quick, efficient motion, Tain thrust the dish into Julian's lap. He took the doctor's almost-full pan next, and flung it forcefully at the Romulan Sub-Lieutenant. All the time he was glaring at the dazed human.

"Share it amongst yourselves," he spat back towards the Romulans. "Just be sure it's cleaned."

( _fade_ )


	5. Field Medicine

**Part I, Act V: Field Medicine**

Julian sat on his cot, enduring the uncomfortable sag of the straps in exchange for the security of having a wall at his back. His left foot was planted firmly so that he could lean his elbow on his lap and cradle his head in his hand. The right foot rested loosely on its heel so that his injured knee was extended into the least painful position possible. His right forearm lay across his thigh, and he was staring vacantly at his wrist. He had pushed up his sleeve two hours ago to assess the damage, and had not bothered to tug it back down. Nothing was broken or even dislocated, but he now wore a bracelet of deep purple bruises: the marks of the Jem'Hadar's fingers. It was stark proof of the reality of this nightmare.

"Why don't you go for a walk and clear your head, Doctor?" Tain suggested boisterously. He was lying on his own pallet with his hands folded on his chest. He had been there since they came back from the mess area, never deigning to stare at the Starfleet officer but still observing him without surcease. "You seemed eager enough to go charging off before."

"I don't want to," Julian said sourly. He grimaced at the petulant sound of the words and nodded his head against his palm, digging his fingertips up into his hair.

"You haven't had a proper look at the place yet," Tain went on, his tone one of good natured needling. that Julian did not believe for a minute. "Don't you want to get a feel for the perimeter? Observe where the guards are routinely posted? Explore all the nooks and crannies? What happened to that famed Starfleet curiosity?"

Julian did intend to do all of those things. Among the grimmer things taught at the Academy were the responsibilities of an officer when taken as a prisoner of war. In addition to continuing to conduct oneself with honour and loyalty to the precepts of the Federation, one had an obligation to resist the enemy with all available means. This might mean civil disobedience or acts of sabotage, although medical officers were governed by a specific exemption to the clause prohibiting the rendering of "any aid or succour" to hostile combatants: doctors were permitted to continue to discharge their higher ethical duty to provide care to all in need, without fear or favour. But no officer, whatever their branch of the service, was excused from the obligation to try to escape.

There was nothing in the Starfleet Code of Conduct, however, that said he had to initiate those efforts at this particular moment. Any attempt to assess the limitations and security arrangements of the camp would involve a good deal of walking, and Julian was under orders from the only representative of Starfleet Medical in this sector to rest his strained knee. It was part of a four-pronged treatment plan, one of the first he had ever learned: rest, ice, compress, elevate. Neither ice nor bandages were readily available, and he was not being very assiduous about the imperative to elevate, but Julian was determined to rest.

"No, thank you," he said tightly.

"Come now, Doctor," Tain cajoled. "It won't do to sit there brooding all day. Important to keep up your spirits! A change of scenery would do you good."

_Keep up your spirits_? Julian could not think of any phrase more antithetical to the philosophy of the Obsidian Order. Then again, if Tain had made as careful a study of humans as he claimed, he surely knew the flavour of their motivational phrases and platitudes. The growing feeling that he was being manipulated by the aged Cardassian intensified, and suddenly Julian thought he saw a motive.

"And then you can disappear again," he said, lifting his brow from the cradle of his palm and leaning forward onto both forearms, hands dangling between his knees as he thrust his head forward to stare levelly at Tain. It was a posture that came very naturally to his long, lean frame, but one that he usually tried to avoid. A tactless but not particularly malicious classmate had once remarked that it made him look like a buzzard.

Tain chuckled, turning his head to look Julian over quizzically. "I beg your pardon?" he said.

"That's what you want," Julian said wonderingly, almost smiling. He nodded his head slowly. "You want me to turn my back so that you can vanish like you did after the count this morning. Well, go ahead! I won't stop you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Tain huffed, stretching his neck as he fixed his eyes on the ceiling again. The powerful muscles that supported the auxiliary vertebrae rippled under his grey skin. His tone was once more buoyant and good-natured when he added; "If you ask me, you're letting your imagination run away with you, Doctor. What was that little display at mealtime? Looked to me like you were having a waking nightmare."

Julian twisted his lip sourly. "This whole place is a waking nightmare," he retorted. He hesitated for a moment, knowing that he should not give Tain any information that he might be able to exploit but needing very badly to unburden himself to someone. He choose a middle ground. "I was thinking about what my being here will mean for my friends on Deep Space Nine," he admitted.

"Oh-ho, I see!" Tain guffawed. "Well, Doctor, I'm sure they'll be  _prostrate_ with grief. I don't suppose humans find much consolation in knowing a loved one fell nobly in battle?"

"We do," Julian said quietly. "We mourn of course, but yes: yes it is a consolation, of sorts, to know a friend died for a purpose, for a broader good. But I'm not dead, am I? In battle or any other way."

"No." Tain dragged out the syllable so far that the Universal Translator computed that it was no longer a language sound at all and dropped the interpretation. Julian caught the last half-second in Cardassian. Tain flashed a toothy smile at the ceiling. "But your friends aren't to know that, are they, Doctor? Do you suppose Garak already believes you dead, as he does me? Now he's lost his only friend on that godforsaken station, I wonder how he'll  _cope_?"

There was such relish in his tone as he said this that Julian's anger flared. He could tolerate being mocked himself: he expected no better from Tain. But that man had no right to mock Garak, not after everything he had put his one-time protégé through. Not after the relish with which he had said he wished the Cardassian exile a long and miserable life cut off from his world and his people. Not after dragging Garak into the Gamma Quadrant on a suicide mission — and one, worse still, that might have landed him  _here_.

"Garak doesn't believe me dead!" Julian roared, launching off the cot. He remembered to put most of his weight on his left leg, and the motion was smooth and wrathful. He felt like breaking into a pacing stride, ricocheting from one end of the barracks to the other and back again like a raquetball at high speed, but he didn't. Instead, he rounded the bench with two stilted steps. "None of them do! Don't you understand, Tain? I've been  _replaced_."

The word seemed to echo off the walls, though that should have been acoustically impossible. Maybe it was only echoing in Julian's skull. His breath hitched in the back of his throat as his body went cold with dismay. He had not meant to say that, and especially not to Enabran Tain.

"Is that so?" Each word came crisply, slowly, distinct from its fellows. Like a leviathan rising from ancient seas, Tain sat up on the cot, swinging his legs over the side and looking up at Julian with an expression of haughty triumph on his broad face. "I wondered if it might be something like that. How do you know?"

Julian wanted to bite his tongue, or maybe to flee the barracks entirely. Tain had told him to go for a walk: perhaps he should go. But there was no use in that. If he didn't answer now, Tain would get it out of him eventually. After all, it hadn't proved very difficult for him to get this much.

"The Vorta," Julian said tightly, aware of how stiffly he was standing but unable to affect a more carefree posture. "Deyos. He told me. And before you remind me that the Vorta are just as prone to…  _obfuscation_  as you are, I've considered it. There's no other reason they could have had to take me."

"Not privy to fleet orders or troop movements, I suppose," said Tain, nodding to show that he followed the Starfleet officer's reasoning. "You wouldn't have access to battle plans or sensitive intelligence, not very far in advance, at least. But when the moment of crisis arose, you'd be briefed without question, wouldn't you? Starfleet Captains trust their doctors implicitly, don't they?"

He made it sound like a foible of the mentally incompetent, and Julian's pride stung. He had worked tirelessly every day of his career to prove himself worthy of the implicit trust of men like Benjamin Sisko. His Captain's faith in him meant everything. Stiffening still further and squaring his shoulders just a little more, he answered.

"Yes. On a well-run crew, they do. They should be able to," he said, relieved at the adamantine certainty in his voice.

"On Cardassia, we never trust our doctors," Tain said dismissively, almost reminiscing. "Tricky devils. You can never count on them to put the State before their work. Not terribly particular about what kind of patients they take, either. They'd heal the enemy sooner than watch them die."

The casual contempt in his words disgusted Julian. "Where I come from," he said; "impartiality and mercy in treatment are a sacred charge."

Tain snorted. "You'd treat one of those Jem'Hadar if you could save its life?" he challenged, unbelieving.

"I would," Julian said, taking more pride in those words than in any he had spoken since first waking in this desolate place. His efforts had proved fruitless, but he knew now the mettle of his ethics. "I have."

"Then you're a fool," spat Tain, casting his gaze away as if it offended him to look at Julian. The he drew in a deep lungful of air and let out one of his deliberate coughs. He patted his knee, nodding at the bench. "Now sit down," he said, once again donning his blusteringly amiable façade. "And tell me more about this shape-shifter who's taken your place."

Julian's brow furrowed in disbelief. "You can't really imagine I would discuss it with you," he said.

"What do you think you've been doing?" asked Tain, amused. "Oh, I had to startle it out of you, but let's be honest, Doctor: it wasn't that difficult. Do you know what I think? I think you want to talk to  _someone_ about it. You  _need_  to talk to someone. And here I am! Ready and listening."

Julian shook his head ever so slightly. A truly gifted interrogator did not drag information out of a reluctant victim, but instead convinced his subjects to unburden themselves. He was about to say something along those lines when the door slid noisily open. Major Kalenna came striding in, with Parvok close upon her heels.

"They're beginning," she said curtly, then went to her bunk. The three canteens were ranged in a tidy line beneath, and she took one. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, her cold eyes on Julian, and then she pulled off the lid and drank.

Parvok sat stiffly on the edge of his bunk, hands folded over his knees. He was managing to maintain a stoic expression, but the green tinge of blood was high in his cheeks and his lips were very white. He was terrified.

"Beginning what?" Julian asked, starting for the door.

"With who?" asked Tain, sounding almost regretful. "Have they let him out already?"

"No," said Kalenna. "One of your people."

"They may be Cardassians, but they're not  _my people_ ," said Tain. "If by that you mean they follow me or obey my orders. I don't have any obligation to look after soldiers who failed in their duty to Cardassia."

He swung his legs back up onto the cot and lay back.

Julian was at the door now, puzzled and uneasy but burning with a need for answers. He slapped the panel by the door, and it opened.

Kalenna grabbed his wrist, her fingers closing on the same place the Jem'Hadar had seized him at the water station. Julian's pulse quickened at the sensory memory, and his bruises ached under the pressure.

"Don't be a fool," Kalenna hissed.

He flung her off. "Since no one wants to answer my questions, I had better go look for myself, hadn't I?" he said, irritated. A part of him knew that he was being foolish and stubborn, and that he ought to trust that she was trying to spare him something. But everything about this hateful place and this hated day had put him in a foul mood, and the truth was that when he was in a foul mood he didn't always make perfectly rational decisions.

He slid out between the doors just as they slid shut, and found himself out in the corridor alone.

There was a face with unfamiliar features in one of the windows of Barracks 1, just across the pod. The alien inside was craning to look off towards the mouth of the corridor and the atrium beyond. Julian scarcely paused to glance at him as he started off towards the sound of a scuffle.

He was almost to the first support pylon when he realized that the crowd gathered ahead of him was mostly Jem'Hadar. They were assembled in a loose arc, their weapons for once slung across their backs, leaning in with interest. Julian stopped mid-stride and slid into the shadow of the arcing girder, trying to make himself inconspicuous but unwilling to retreat. They were gathered about the lighted ring in the middle of the floor, the one that the prisoners avoided and even the guards seemed to respect, but that Deyos had strolled unconcernedly through during the count.

Inside the ring, two men were grappling with each other. On any Federation planet, Julian would have said they were wrestling, but although the stances were similar, the contest itself was far more violent. As he watched, one man locked shoulders with the other. Instead of trying to gain a good throwing hold, the aggresor raised both hands behind his opponents head while the other was busy trying to push him off. The fingers were interlaced into one mammoth fist, which fell like a hammer between the other man's shoulder-blades. He buckled beneath the force and lost his grip, crashing to the ground when his opponent sprang backward.

The man on his feet was a Jem'Hadar. The one on the floor, now trying to drag himself up out of the dust, was a Cardassian. The Jem'Hadar stepped back, closer to the perimeter of the ring. He was still crouched in a combat stance, but he was waiting. Suddenly the Cardassian got his knee under himself and staggered to his feet. He groped for the nearest of the three posts, and slapped it with his palm. Long lighted panels on the post illuminated briefly as an electronic gong reverberated in the air. The two combatants circled one another briefly, warily, and then the Jem'Hadar lunged again.

The watching circle of guards was silent but obviously transfixed. Julian could not look away either, but he was confident that he wasn't wearing the expressions of studious fascination he saw on the far side of the ring. His palm found the pylon, bracing against it, as the Cardassian, still trying to wrestle, took a backhanded blow from the Jem'Hadar's fist. He reeled, unbalanced, but collided with one of the posts before he could fall. The gong sounded again, and the Jem'Hadar charged.

The Cardassian couldn't seem to muster his wits enough to adapt his fighting style to his opponent's more brutal one. He fell again, and struggled up. He managed to land a blow, but the Jem'Hadar soldier lost balance for only a moment before righting himself. The Cardassian tried to retreat, and under the laboured breathing and the whirling of limbs Julian's sharp ears picked up a familiar flap-flap sound. It was the Cardassian who had tried to take his boots, at the expense of his knee.

The Alpha Quadrant soldier was dazed and tiring. The Jem'Hadar's next blow sent him crashing to his knees. An armoured knee drove into the socket of his shoulder in a move that almost any martial sport with which Julian was acquainted would have considered extremely bad form. The Cardassian crashed backward and lay still.

The other fighter waited, alert for the moment when his opponent might rise again, but he did not. The Cardassian was still alive, his chest heaving, but his movements were small and stilted: twitches of semiconscious pain.

"Victory to Eighth Talak'Ran," one of the watchers anounced. "Victory is life."

"Victory is life!" the others chorused, and although Julian had heard the call-and-response before, the sheer weight of the noise under the vaulted ceiling made him jump.

The Eighth climbed out of the ring, stepping disdainfully over the fallen prisoner as he went. "That was no challenge, Third," he said to the Jem'Hadar who had announced his win. "I can do better. Let me have another match."

"Not today," the Third said. "Orders from First Ikat'ika. We are not to waste our strength today."

He said this last with a broad sweep of his head that included the other Jem'Hadar in the announcement. It apparently had some significance that Julian did not comprehend, because most of them nodded appreciatively and several made noises of growling eagerness.

"Return to your posts," the Third instructed. He looked disdainfully at the Cardassian and shook his head. "His kind showed such promise at first."

Julian wanted to shrink deeper into the shadow of the pillar as the guards began to disperse, but that was futile. The very first one to turn saw him, and bared his upper teeth disdainfully.

"Does it frighten you, human?" he jeered, and strode deliberately past the pylon so that Julian had to press himself against it to avoid being trampled.

Common sense was screaming at him to get back to the relative shelter of the barracks, where at least there was some consolation, if not precisely safety, in numbers. But he did not like the way the Cardassian was twitching, nor the ferocity of the blows he had seen the man take. As soon as the way was clear, he hastened to the edge of the ring and took an awkward, limping hop over the lip.

Someone on the far side of the atrium had been watching with similar intentions. Another Cardassian stopped short at the perimeter just as Julian was about to kneel awkwardly beside the fallen one. Steely eyes narrowed, and the prominent supraorbital ridges cast suddenly ominous shadows.

"Come to take your vengeance, human?" the Cardassian growled.

For a moment, Julian had no idea what he was talking about. Then he understood that this must be the boot-snatcher's accomplice. He shook his head incredulously.

" _No_ ," he said, disgusted and dismissive at once. He got awkwardly down onto his good knee and reached for the Cardassian's forehead. "I'm a doctor. I'm trying to help him."

He tilted the man's brow back, lifting his chin to open his airway. Then Julian landmarked with his fingers and found the temporal pulse. It was one of the first things he had learned when his friendship with Garak had awakened an interest in Cardassian physiology: their carotid arteries were inaccessible for the customary human method of manually assessing a heart rate. The vessels were buried under the auxiliary vertebrae that ran from the shoulder up the sides of the neck. The temple it was, then, unless he wanted to strip off the heavy armour in search of the brachial pulse.

The rhythm was quick and thready, and the Cardassian's breathing was laboured. Perhaps it would be best to remove the armour after all. Julian looked up at the man's compatriot to suggest it, only to find the other Cardassian looming over him menacingly.

"Leave him be, human," he said. "You may have the protection of Enabran Tain, but that does not mean we are interested in your meddling."

"There's no telling what injuries he's sustained," Julian protested. "He could have broken bones, internal bleeding, he's almost certainly got a concussion—"

"Leave him be!" the Cardassian repeated.

"Are you a relative?" Julian asked. "Has he authorized you to refuse medical care on his behalf?" The other man looked confused. "Well, then. I'm treating him unless he tells me to stop." He turned back to his patient.

"You will not!" The Cardassian seized Julian's shoulder and tried to wrench him away, but Julian was quicker, better nourished, and possessed of enhanced reflexes and hand-eye coordination. He twisted to the left, slipping right out of the standing man's grasp over the heel of his palm. At the same moment, his left hand whipped up around the back of his head and grabbed the Cardassian's wrist. He twisted, letting physics and physiology do the real work as the Cardassian's elbow joint clamped closed on the major caudal nerve feeding the forearm. It was a peculiarity of Cardassian anatomy: most other humanoid species had two or more large nerves to do the job, and none were as easily entrapped. Although painless, the manoeuvre made the entire hand go numb in under a second.

The Cardassian cried out in alarm, and stumbled back so that he could yank free of a grip that was already releasing. The back of one foot hit the rim of the arena, and he had to leap over it to keep from falling backward. He clutched his arm, staring at Julian in horror and astonishment.

Julian wasn't interested in him. He was concerned for his patient's breathing, and he was trying to get a good look at the hinges that held the front of his breastplate to the back. "I told you, I'm treating him," he said. "Now either you can help me get him out of this thing, or you can stand there uselessly, or you can scurry off to hide in your barracks, but don't try to manhandle me again!"

There was a long silence, during which Julian leaned in, squinting to make out the fasteners in the gloom. He thought he saw how they worked and tried to loosen one, but all he managed to do was pinch the pad of his thumb painfully.

"I am a Glinn in the Cardassian Guard and a member of the Obsidian Order," the man protested at last, stiffly. "I do not take orders from humans."

"Fine," said Julian, exasperated with this posturing. "Would you consider a request from a doctor who's trying to make sure your friend can keep breathing for the next few minutes?" There was no response. He didn't look up, but took the silence for assent. "Could you  _please_  show me how to get this damned thing off!"

The Glinn made an indecisive noise, then snorted in cornered ascent and hopped back into the ring. "You need to twist them," he said, demonstrating on the side Julian hadn't touched yet. "Twist and lift."

They made short work of releasing the hinges, and Julian flung the front half of the breastplate up and over the fallen man's head. It released the strong, musky smell of an unwashed body, pungent and faintly reptilian in this case. The chill of the prison did something to mitigate the cumulative odours of many species gathered in tight quarters, but just now, Julian was entirely too close to one of the sources. He tried to close his sinuses and began to breathe out of his mouth. He had no intention of denying crucial care because of a smell, however unpleasant.

Almost immediately he could hear a marked improvement in his patient's breathing: the man's intercostal muscles were no longer struggling to lift the weight of the armour as well as his battered ribs. And battered they were. After opening the front of the Cardassian's padded arming shirt and releasing another waft of musk, Julian found at least two that were cracked. One of the sternal appendages was cleanly broken, too. Julian wasn't sure if that was as high-risk as a fractured metasternum could be in a human, but he hoped not.

His inability to do anything to put right these injuries sickened him. They were straightforward fractures: with an osteogenic stimulator, Julian could have knit the bones back together in under twenty minutes, leaving the patient with nothing but some residual soreness and a few days of bruising. Here, he didn't even have a compression knit bandage to wrap the ribs.

"Is there anything in your barracks I could use to bind his chest?" he asked wearily, not very hopeful.

The Cardassian shook his head. "Nothing," he said.

Julian was examining the beaten man's neck now, looking for trouble. But despite the knee he had taken to the shoulder, his four interlaced collarbones were not broken. That was a relief. A broken collarbone in a Cardassian was as dangerous and destabilizing as a broken pelvis in a human. The vertebrae all seemed to be intact as well, at least the ones on the sides. Julian would worry about the cervical set later: if the auxiliary bones were unaffected, they stabilized the spinal column without the need for a collar. Which was a very good thing, because he didn't have one of those, either.

The skull was next. Julian's hands travelled deftly but not quickly, navigating the unfamiliar ridges and feeling through the cover of oily and dank-smelling black hair. There were no obvious fractures, depressed or otherwise, but the Cardassian was bleeding heavily behind his left ear. The scalp had split over the occipital bone, which probably explained why the blow hadn't broken the skull. Julian's hand came back from this expedition coated in slick, dark blood.

"Apply pressure here," he said, grabbing the Glinn's hand and dragging it to where he wanted it. At his touch, his reluctant assistant stiffened and tried halfheartedly to pull away. But when his fingers were in place, he held them there.

"We need some sort of dressing," said Julian. At any other time — in the battlefield, on an away mission, after a natural disaster — he would have simply pushed up his sleeve and torn a strip off of the grey shirt beneath. But the lack of any sort of resources in this place made him wary. He didn't know how long he would be trapped here with nothing but the uniform on his back. It wouldn't be wise to start demolishing it on the second day.

He looked around, hoping to spot another prisoner. There were none to be seen. Like Major Kalenna and Sub-Lieutenant Parvok, they had probably retreated to their barracks when the Jem'Hadar had gathered for the match. There were only the Jem'Hadar in their shoulder-to shoulder pairs, making less frequent visual sweeps of the atrium than usual because they kept coming back to the goings-on in the ring.

The small hairs on the back of Julian's neck prickled uneasily. He didn't need the curiosity of the sentries. He hadn't liked Parvok's choice of words this morning, but the sentiment behind them was solid: keep a low profile. He certainly wasn't doing that.

He slid his hand in to take the Cardassian's place, maintaining pressure on the wound. It was still oozing freely.

"Go and find something to dress it," said Julian firmly. "A scrap of rag, a sock, anything.  _Please_ ," he added, his voice harder still, in case the Glinn was about to protest again about taking orders from a human.

Instead he said, "Anything?"

Julian blinked at him. " _Yes_ ," he breathed.

The Glin folded back one side of his compatriot's jacket and ripped away an inner pocket that Julian had failed to notice. He plucked it from the Cardassian's hand and folded it into a compress. He inserted it under his other set of fingers, pressing it firmly to the wound. "Good," he said, his voice wavering a little. Whether it was a tremor of strain or a chuckle of relief, he wasn't sure. "Now we just need—"

But the Glinn was already removing one of the straps of stout, woven webbing from the inside of the breastplate. It was just long enough to tie around the unconscious Cardassian's head, though Julian had to bow almost to the floor to tighten the knot with his teeth when there was too little tail to grip with his fingers.

"There," he sighed, attempting to sit back on his heels. He got about halfway before he passed the point beyond which his right knee refused to bend, and knelt up hurriedly with a reflexive hiss of pain. The Glinn frowned at him in puzzlement, and Julian offered a tiny, self-deprecating smile. "Seems I shouldn't have flexed my foot when he tried to tug off my boot," he said. He looked around at the guards, still intermittently watching them, and sighed. "We can't stay here. It's asking for trouble, isn't it?"

"Yes," the Cardassian muttered blackly, glowering about at the Jem'Hadar."

"Go back to your barracks and get two blankets," Julian instructed. "We'll need three other prisoners as well, strong ones. Conscript them if you can't find any volunteers. I'm fairly certain his spine is intact, but I don't want to take any chances."

The Glinn nodded and got to his feet. He hurried off.

While he waited, Julian assessed the defeated Cardassian's more minor injuries. The knuckles of one hand were torn and bloodied: apparently he had got in at least a couple of blows of his own before reverting to a more familiar style of fighting. His cheekbone was lacerated, but if it didn't get infected it probably wouldn't even scar. Julian palpated his abdomen, but the breastplate had done at least part of its job: there were no signs of organ injury.

At last, the Glinn came back. He had two Romulans and the Hunter with him. Julian thought it strange there were no other Cardassians, but he did not raise the question aloud. Instead, he instructed them on how to nest and fold the blankets to create a makeshift stretcher. He was grateful his patient was a Cardassian: he would not have dared to move anyone else in this fashion without first clearing the cervical spine. But it was also because the patient was a Cardassian that he couldn't clear the spine without rolling him onto his back first, and considering the damage to his ribs Julian didn't want to do that on the hard stone floor.

He positioned two of his assistants on either side of the patient, one to manage each quarter. Julian himself controlled the head. Squatting was too painful, and so he had to settle for a strange acrobatic posture with his left leg crouching and his right skimming out at a fifty-degree angle. This earned him a strange look from one of the Romulans, but except for the Hunter these were all military men. They had been accustomed to taking orders from people who spoke with authority, and in these situations Julian never lacked for that.

He counted off the lift, and they followed his lead smoothly. The breastplate stayed behind like a pried-open oyster shell. They laid the unconscious prisoner down on the blankets, and then each of the bearers took a corner while Julian kept his patient's head level and still.

The journey to Barracks 22 was a long one for Julian, even though the improvised team moved swiftly. His knee was feeling the strain, and it was all he could do to keep his steps equal and steady. But at last they were inside, and the patient was settled on one of the high benches — which still sometimes looked like low tables if Julian considered them from a certain angle. Julian had instructed one of the other Cardassians sheltering here to move a pallet to the bench before they set down their burden. He needed a firm surface to work, but he wanted to cushion his patient's ribs.

Once the limp body was on the table, it was easy enough to roll him. The Romulans disappeared and the Hunter moved off to the back of the room, but the Glinn watched intently as Julian eased his patient's arms out of the sleeves of his coat and began to palpate the spinal column. There was more damage to the ribs here, but it was only severe bruising. There was no hematoma on the one unguarded kidney or near the Cardassian's accessory spleen. And his back was sound. Finally, the Starfleet officer and the Glinn rolled him over again, and Julian looked sadly at the bare chest already darkening with bruises.

"There's nothing to bind them with," he said. "He'll be in pain for weeks. Try to keep him quiet, and out of the guards' way. He can't take another beating like this."

He expected the Glinn to agree, as he had to the last few sets of instructions. Instead, he found the Cardassian staring at him with the blackest hatred.

"You must be satisfied to see him like this," he said venomously. "Do you know why they chose him?"

"No," Julian said quietly, incomprehension robbing him of the ability to ask the questions that exploded in his brain. "Why?"

"One of the guards observed us yesterday. He was identified as a troublemaker and selected," the Cardassian spat.

"I see," said Julian, his voice cold and flat. "I fought back when the two of you jumped me, so it's my fault he's lying here now."

"Precisely," snarled the Cardassian.

Julian looked away, taking one last glance at his patient. "I've done what I can for him," he said stiffly. "Keep an eye on that head wound. He might vomit when he wakes up. If he wants my help later on, send someone to find me."

He would have given his barracks number under other circumstances. Now he wasn't sure that was wise. They would find him if they needed him: he wasn't very hard to spot in here.

"You won't be wanted!" the Glinn snapped, but it was a feeble insult and it didn't even penetrate the cold crust of weariness settling across Julian's shoulders.

"Whatever you say," he muttered, and he turned his back. He managed to march the four steps to the door without limping, and smacked the panel with far more force than was necessary. He waited until the door screeched closed behind him before limping off towards his own pod. He could feel the eyes of the Jem'Hadar tracking him as he went.

( _fade to black_ )


	6. The Kingon

**Part** **II** **, Act I: The Klingon**

Tain was gone from Barracks 6 when Julian returned, having first dragged himself to the far end of the pod so that he could clean the Cardassian's blood from his hands. The others were there, much as he had left them, but of the old Cardassian bulldog there was no sign. Julian was not surprised, but he was too tired and sore to be curious. He tried to shuffle to his cot, but caved to the temptation to sink down onto the nearest bench instead. He stretched his right leg and probed his inflamed knee with his fingers. He shut his eyes against the pain, inhaling through his teeth. So much for the last upright prong of his treatment plan.

He could feel eyes upon him. Major Kalenna.

"How often do they do that?" he asked, his eyes still closed. "Select one of the prisoners to fight the Jem'Hadar."

"Every day," the Romulan woman answered. The flatness in her voice ran deeper than the veneer of Tal Shiar decorum.

Now he looked at her, horrified. "The Jem'Hadar are lethal in hand-to-hand combat," he protested.

Kalenna's nod was taut, barely perceptible. "They do not usually take it that far. Not deliberately. Sometimes they… misjudge how much a prisoner can endure."

"That Cardassian… he might have suffocated in the ring. He still might die. Even if he doesn't, he's going to be in agony for weeks," said Julian. He looked down at his hands. They had done their work quickly and efficiently, but there was so much that was beyond their scope without the right tools. "I need medical supplies."

"They will never allow that," said Kalenna bluntly. "If you want to continue to work as a doctor, you will have to manage without instruments."

"I'm not talking about instruments," Julian argued. "I may be a Federation idealist, but I'm not an idiot. I know the Jem'Hadar aren't about to hand me an emergency medkit filled with all sorts of technology that could be used as weapons or adapted to other purposes. I need  _supplies_ : bandages, disinfectants, splints, swabs. Right now, I have nothing. I just bandaged a man's head with the lining of a pocket and a strap pulled off his armour."

"So you have a talent for ingenuity," Kalenna said, as if that ought to cheer him. She looked thoughtful. "We might be able to scavenge material for bandages, given time. If we are able to get word of a corpse before the guards do, a dead man doesn't need his clothes. They would not be sterile, but—"

Julian stared at her. "Starfleet officers don't despoil the dead," he said, dismayed.

She fixed him with eyes that, despite the stony lines of her face, might have held just a glint of pity. "You may have to adjust your ideas of what a Starfleet officer does," she said.

He shook his head. "If I do that, the Dominion has already won."

Kalenna held his gaze for a few long seconds, long enough for Julian to notice that his heart rate was creeping closer to normal. Then she stood up and strode towards the back of the barracks. Julian turned at the waist to watch her go, and then decided it wasn't worth the effort. He went back to manipulating his knee, hoping to coax some relief from the strained sinews.

The Major came back. She had his lone bottle of water in one hand. In the other was the improvised bolster he had been using that morning. She had reassembled it.

"Slide up. I thought you were a doctor. You need to elevate that leg," she said as he took what was offered.

Julian restrained a retort and did as he was told, taking a careful mouthful of water before lying down. Kalenna tucked the rolled blanket with its lumpy core under him, supporting his thigh with a surprisingly accomplished hand until the support was in place. He felt an easing of pressure almost immediately as gravity helped the engorged tissues re-establish efficient venous return. He sighed, and tucked one arm up beneath his head. Stepped back, looking at him appraisingly.

"You are very young for a Chief Medical Officer," she observed. Then she went back to her cot and sat. He could see her if he made an effort, looking straight down his nose, but she was staring at the far wall now and didn't seem interested in further conversation. Julian let his eyes settle back into a natural position, and reacquainted himself with the bolts on the ceiling.

( _fade_ )

Tain did not come back that afternoon. He had still not returned when Kalenna advised Julian that he should take care of any necessary affairs outside the barracks before the guards called curfew. Julian assured her that he had not been invited to make any follow-up housecalls on the occupants of Barracks 22, and so didn't have any affairs to take care of. When she gave him a look of condescending annoyance, he realized that the Universal Translator was having difficulty parsing her euphemism this time instead of his. He got up and went to the waste reclamation room, somewhat chagrined.

It was a quick visit. There was no doubt at all now that he was growing worryingly dehydrated. When he got back to Barracks 6, Enabran Tain was sitting on one of the benches, picking a loose thread from his cuff.

Julian stopped on the threshold, gaze fixated on the former head of the Obsidian Order. He wanted to ask the question. He knew better than to ask the question. He didn't ask the question. When he cleared their path at last, the doors squawked in weary protest as they closed.

His knee felt better for the hours he had spent on his back, but the rest of Julian was stiff and not quite ready to lie down again. He wondered how strictly bedtime was observed by his cellmates. Tired though he was, sleep seemed improbable tonight.

Somewhere outside, he heard the distinctive bark of a shouting Jem'Hadar. Julian tensed, but neither Tain nor the Breen bestirred themselves. The two Romulans were not in the barracks, and Julian knew they could not be down the corridor because he'd just come from there. If there was trouble in the atrium, they might get caught up in it.

"Did you hear that?" Julian asked, starting back towards the door. He was moving almost like his usual limber self, and he issued a stern reminder to be careful of his right leg. There was another shout, and a third, and then a different voice that most definitely was not Jem'Hadar rose in a feral roar of rage and indignation. Julian couldn't make out the words through the bulkheads, but the quality of the tone was unmistakable. There was only one species in the Galaxy that produced lungs like that.

He shot a flabbergasted look at Tain. "Are there  _Klingons_ here?" he demanded.

Tain had ignored his previous question, still inspecting his cuffs. Now he straightened and looked suddenly very alert. As he got to his feet, Julian thought he was seeing how the man had looked thirty years ago at the height of his power, when his reign of terror had held all of Cardassia to heel.

"Only one," he said, coming for the door and opening it with a brisk smack of his palm. "And it seems they've turned him loose."

Julian followed him, trotting to keep up. He was beginning to understand how the man could vanish and reappear almost in the blink of an eye. He could move like a razorcat when he wanted to.

The atrium was almost empty of prisoners, and there were fewer guards than before: apparently the night shift was lighter. But down at the far end, a horseshoe formation of Jem'Hadar wielding kar'takin blades instead of their ubiquitous rifles were dancing side-to-side on nimble feet as they tried to herd a wild-looking prisoner. He was pivoting on one bare foot, facing each of the guards in turn, long, dark hair whipping around his face and his broad shoulders. He had no weapon that Julian could see, but his arms were tensed and ready to strike. His legs were crouched to spring. Savage with rage, he looked ready to tear the throat from any Jem'Hadar that drew too close.

Tain strode forward, right for the heart of the chaos. Unsure what else to do, Julian followed. As he drew nearer, he took in other details. The Klingon had neither armour nor boots, and the only garment he wore was a discoloured loincloth. The ridges of his vertebrae were prominent on his back, evocative of the distinctive cranial features on his brow.

The situation before him was obviously out of control. The Klingon was hissing and spitting, bellowing out an endless string of oaths and invectives that no Universal Translator could possibly cope with. The Jem'Hadar were growing more agitated, clearly longing to slash at the prisoner with weapons that looked to have been brought out purely for the purposes of intimidation. And behind those who were trying to drive the Klingon out into the middle of the atrium, four guards armed with plasma rifles were at the ready.

First Ikat'ika stood between the two ranks of his men. As those with the plasma weapons began to shift, he held up a staying hand.

"Do not shoot!" he commanded levelly. "Hold your fire. Remember he is worth more to us alive."

His voice drew the Klingon's attention, but only for a moment. He was squinting as if blinded by the light, and his ribs were heaving. If Julian had been called upon to give his professional opinion in that moment, he would have ventured to suggest he was witnessing the Klingon equivalent of a panic attack — but to his knowledge no such phenomenon had ever been documented, at least not under  _that_  name.

"Do you know him?" he asked Tain, who had stopped at the last of the support pylons and was keeping it judiciously between himself and the sights of the Jem'Hadar weapons. "What are they doing with him?"

"I know him," said Tain. "He's been in isolation. Apparently they've just let him out."

Julian's eyes widened in horror. "They put a Klingon in isolation?" he breathed. "But that's—"

The Klingon lunged at one of the Jem'Hadar surrounding him. He seized the shaft of the kar'takin with one hand, and got the other one through the gap in the blade. He pushed back on what Julian sincerely hoped was an unsharpened inner edge, trying to fling the Jem'Hadar by his own weapon. The others flanking him moved in to close around the Klingon.

"Do not kill him," Ikat'ika warned, but as the Klingon leaned in further and tried to use his shoulder for leverage against the bevelled edge of the blade, it began to look as if he was going to take care of that task all by himself.

Julian bolted forward, unable to stand idly by. In the corner of his eye he caught Enabran Tain's exasperated expression and the way his lips parted to form a scathing remark about human folly, and then he was running towards the Jem'Hadar.

"Stop!" he called out. He was distantly aware of the haughty exasperation in his voice. It came out sometimes, against his better judgment, when he saw others disregarding something he saw as perfectly obvious. "Stop and give him space, damn it. You've got him surrounded: of course he's going to fight you in the state he's in. Get back and let him see where he is!"

The nearest Jem'Hadar came at him, blade swinging low. It was aimed right for his navel, and Julian prepared himself for a very risky side-step. But Ikat'ika's stern voice rang out, "Do as the human says!"

The guard who had been charging at Julian stopped short, and the others all trained their eyes upon him — all but the one that was locked in the deadly wrestling match over the blade.

Julian tried to wet his lips, but his mouth was bone dry. It wasn't just the deepening dehydration: he was beginning to realize what a vaingloriously rash thing he had just done. It was the idea of the panic attack that had driven him to it: he'd been seeing the patient, not the threats.

"Step back, and put the blades away!" he shouted hoarsely. "You can keep the rifles ready if you must, but don't move, and for God's sake don't shoot him. He doesn't know what he's doing."

"Fourth! Drop your weapon. Withdraw!" Ikat'ika barked.

In the Jem'Hadar officer's place, Julian never would have had the courage for the manoeuvre he witnessed next. The guard who was sharing his hold on his kar'takin with the crazed Klingon opened both hands and dropped to one knee in a single perfect movement. He tucked his shoulders, ducked his head, and the Klingon and the blade both flew forward, tumbling over him and landing in an instinctive tactical roll behind. The Fourth sprang up smoothly and trotted back to join the others, who had pulled back as ordered.

The Klingon rebounded to his feet, adjusting his hold on the blade and sweeping it in a lethal arc aimed at Ikat'ika. The altitude of the stroke was perfect, and it would have taken the Jem'Hadar First's head clean off except for one small detail: the blade sliced through the air a good three metres short of its target.

Perplexed, the Klingon hesitated. He stared down at the weapon, the eye that Julian could see from this side still screwed up against the light. Then he looked up at Ikat'ika and jabbed again, far less spectacularly this time.

This was the moment where the rational person was supposed to step in and calmly defuse the situation while the panicked patient was dazed and irresolute. Julian couldn't quite bring himself to do it. His instinct for self-preservation was returning, and trying to disarm an unhinged Klingon warrior seemed like a very good way to get killed. The last time he'd had any dealings with Klingons other than Commander Worf had been at the subterranean field hospital on Ajilon Prime. They hadn't exactly been willing to listen.

The Klingon shifted again, snarled, and then raised the polearm high above his head. He thrust one foot back for leverage, preparing to spring at Ikat'ika. The First shifted from his stiff-necked Jem'Hadar posture into a battle stance, flexing the fingers of his upraised hands. There was a glint of anticipation in his eye, too clinical to be called bloodlust but of the same genus.

"There you are!" a brisk and boisterous voice declared, as if this had only just become apparent. Enabran Tain stepped out of the shadow of the pillar, sauntering forward with a gait both unworried and unhurried. He brushed past Julian and strolled right up to the Klingon. From his manner, Julian half-expected him to hold out a hand to be shaken.

"It's getting late," Tain went on conversationally. He smiled at the guards, who probably didn't appreciate what a chilling expression that was on this man's face. "These gentlemen would like to be about their business, and it's time for you and I to get back to our barracks. Would you care to join me?"

Finally, the Klingon looked at him. He whipped his head to the side, searching Tain's face, and Julian finally saw the source of the spatial awareness misjudgement. It hadn't been emotional but physical: the Klingon's left eye was gone. In its place was a flap of twisted scar tissue, spidery keloid tendrils creeping from the corner of the socket out onto his cheek. It was something he had probably learned to compensate for, when he was in his right mind. At the moment, in the throes of irrational madness, he had forgotten how to cope.

The Klingon's chest was heaving and he was still poised to strike. His head shifted from side to side. It was not quite a negative answer. Instead, it was as if he was trying to clear the fog from his mind. Stunned confusion had replaced rage, and his lips quivered soundlessly around his bared fangs. Julian didn't need to run through a cultural equivalency algorithm to interpret that expression: he was fairly certain he had worn one very like it just yesterday. It was the terrified and enraged bewilderment of a man coming slowly back to consciousness after losing himself to madness — or a mysterious Dominion drug.

Tain held the warrior's gaze steadily as his hand closed on the shaft of the kar'takin.. "Give me  _thaaat_ ," he snorted, as if prying a kitchen utensil away from a child. He gave the weapon a quick twist, and the Klingon's frozen fingers resisted for only a moment.

Tain looked at the blade distastefully, then meandered over to hand it to Ikat'ika. It was the only thing to do, but it was a strange thing to see. Julian couldn't imagine a Klingon or a Starfleet officer or even a Romulan surrendering a weapon so casually to an enemy captor. Tain made it look like the most natural thing in the world:  _just returning this nice man's lost property, nothing to see here._

"I take it you're finished with him?" he asked offhandedly, jerking his chin back towards the Klingon, who was still blinking like a rudely-awakened sleepwalker. He was staring up at the dome now, as if he could not quite believe it was there.

"We are finished. For now." Ikat'ika gestured back over his shoulder, waving away the others. "The prisoner is subdued. Disperse to your positions. Varat'elar!"

Another Jem'Hadar stepped out of the shadows. All the others had been armed in one way or another, but this one carried an assortment of items that Julian recognized after a moment as the accoutrements of a soldier of the Klingon Empire: boots, armour, padded leather trousers, gauntlets and all. The bearer stopped just short of Tain, and dropped the whole heap at his feet with a disdainful grunt. He walked away.

"See that he is ready tomorrow afternoon," the First instructed, glaring coldly at the Cardassian. "The men are restless for the challenge."

He turned and marched away. The other Jem'Hadar were disappearing into the shadows and the side passages. Tain looked down at the hill of gear at his feet, and then at the Klingon. He shook his head in idle unbelief, and started back towards Barracks 6.

"See he finds his way back, won't you, Doctor?" he asked as he passed. "Six minutes 'til curfew."

Julian opened his mouth in protest, but no sound came out. Helpless to protest, he looked wildly from Tain to the Klingon. The warrior had one arm outstretched before him, staring at the upturned palm. Steeling his courage and trying to remember everything Jadzia had ever told him about Klingon manners, Julian approached. Another part of his brain was rapidly cross-referencing against all of his dealings with Commander Worf.

When it came time to speak, however, he could think of nothing imposing or Klingon-like to say. His bedside manner surfaced instead, though he had presence of mind enough to keep too much of the kind reassurance from seeping through.

"Come on," he said calmly. "Let's get you dressed."

The Klingon blinked at him, a painful thing to watch with his mutilated left socket. Julian wondered, with the righteous anger of a gifted surgeon, who had bungled the healing of that gruesome wound. Even supposing the eye had been beyond saving — and he was inclined to feel very skeptical about  _that_  — there was no reason to leave the man maimed and half-blind. He could have done better himself with nothing more than an autosuture and a pair of forceps.

The warrior shook his head slowly. "A Starfleet officer?" he murmured. His voice was deep and throaty, coarsened with strain but resounding and purposeful even in his confusion. "Here? What deception is this?"

"Do you know where you are?" Julian asked, lapsing reflexively into a routine cognitive assessment.

The warrior growled deep in his throat, a quintessentially Klingon sound of grim disgust.

"I am flung to the farthest reaches of the Galaxy, idling my days away in captivity while the Dominion hounds stalk my people!" the Klingon declaimed.

All right, then. He knew where he was.

"We need to get back to the barracks," said Julian. He glanced around. They were very exposed here, and the nearest pair of Jem'Hadar sentries were watchign them. The rest of the exam could wait. "I'm not sure what the consequences are for breaking curfew, but I'm guessing they won't be pleasant."

The other man growled again. He shifted one bare foot and spread a hand across his breastbone. His skin was webbed with scars: some the clean wounds of sharp blades, some not. A few looked worryingly fresh. There was a thin slice along his right shoulder, oozing blood where he had touched the blade of the kar'takin.

Julian stooped down, forgetting his knee until it was too late to spare himself the sharp pain. It was surprisingly difficult to remember you were injured when you were accustomed to the privilege of sound physical condition. He started sifting through the pile of garments and armour, searching for something warm to put on the Klingon's back. His people had a lower tolerance for cold than humans, too, and even Julian was tensed against the urge to shiver.

"It was  _good,_ " the warrior sighed distantly; "to hold a blade in my hands once more. Even if it was an ugly thing without grace or lineage."

Julian changed his mind and picked up the heavy chainmail shirt. He held it up, underestimating the weight and obliged to shift his grip as it tried to slither out of his hands. "Take this," he said firmly. "And the boots. I'll carry the rest."

The Klingon complied, his shoulders squaring noticeably as he took control of his armour. Julian got to his feet and adjusted the armload of clothes, buckles, and plates. He had a moment's difficulty juggling the bracers before the Klingon plucked them away.

They crossed the silent atrium, moving in and out of the puddles of harsh, cold light. The Klingon moved stiffly, as though his joints pained him. When they drew near the combat ring he stiffened, and straightened further into his warrior's stance. But he said nothing.

They reached the barracks door just as the klaxon blared out. "Twenty seconds to curfew," a Jem'Hadar voice announced over a hidden comm. "Prisoners, twenty seconds to curfew."

It wasn't enough warning for anyone actually abroad, but there wasn't time to meditate on the injustice of this. Julian fumbled two fingers free and bent awkwardly so that he could open the door. The Klingon stepped across the threshold with the broad, out-toed stance most warriors employed. Julian wondered if it was learned, or a consequence of some genetic predilection for femoral retroversion. Whatever the case, Commander Worf had probably had to do a lot of work to overcome it as a cadet.

He had to slide past the Klingon to get into the room, and did so just in time. The alarm sounded again, one harsh blast that must surely have awakened anyone who had tried to turn in early, and the door slammed closed with its usual squawking hiss. The control panel blipped and then glowed an ugly yellow. Julian didn't need to try it to understand that they were locked in for the night.

"Why don't you have a seat, and I can examine you?" he said to the Klingon as he unloaded his arms onto the nearest bench. "I ought to have a look at that shoulder."

The Klingon grunted, and dropped his armour on top of the rest of his clothes. The boots fell to the floor. He surveyed the barracks. The other prisoners were all accounted for: Tain sitting languidly on his cot, the Breen lying in their customary place, and the two Romulans standing near the back of the room.

The Klingon's eye fixed on Kalenna. Julian waited warily. The animus between the Klingons and the Romulans was legendary. But the warrior only nodded his head once, tightly but with a striking respect.

"Major," he said.

"General," Kalenna responded in kind. "It's good to have you back."

The Klingon made one quick, barking sound that might have been a laugh. His gaze sought out Julian, and he scowled. In the steadier light of Barracks 6, and now that the need for a quick retreat from under the watchful eyes of the Jem'Hadar was passed, Julian felt a jolt of impossible recognition.

Humans had difficulty placing faces out of context, and an enhanced eidetic memory did not change that. It had to do with the way information was stored in the neural pathways, the thousands of faces a person might see in a lifetime cross-referenced with a host of framing clues to aid recollection. Add to that the well-documented phenomenon of preferential ingroup differentiation, and it wasn't surprising that Julian had failed to place the warrior's face until this moment. But he still felt foolish for not seeing it immediately, and now that he had, he gawked in incredulous consternation.

"You're General Martok!" he blurted.

The Klingon, one of his people's greatest military minds and the progenitor of the current war between the Empire and the Federation, squinted briefly and then nodded curt affirmation.

( _fade_ )

Julian stood with his back against the sealed barracks door, vigilant as Martok dressed himself. All thoughts of continuing to assess the Klingon's physical and mental state had faded, lost in a vortex of rapidly cycling recollections and extrapolations.

When Odo had returned after his judgement at the hands of the Founders, relegated permanently to the body of a Solid, he had brought with him a critical piece of intelligence. A Changeling had infiltrated the Klingon High Council. Julian had performed the surgeries to alter Odo, Captain Sisko, and Miles O'Brien to appear Klingon, and with Commander Worf they had infiltrated an elite gathering of warriors to root out the imposter. They had uncovered the Founder, disguised not as Chancellor Gowron as they had expected, but as one of his foremost commanders: Martok.

If Julian had been taken and replaced, it stood to reason that Martok had as well. He had not paused to consider it before, because since the discovery and death of the Changeling spy, the real Martok had been widely assumed dead. Yet here he was, living yet, and under circumstances that must be intolerable to any Klingon warrior.

It was good news in principle: one less death on the Dominion's account. For Julian personally, it complicated matters significantly to be sharing a cell with the man who had precipitated the collapse of the Khitomer Accords and the bloody war that was still embroiling their two powers. Over a year and a half ago, General Martok had led an attack on Cardassia Prime that had resulted in the displacement of the leaders of Cardassia's first civilian government in decades. Unable to stand by and allow the unknowing world to be overrun by a cloaked Klingon fleet, Captain Sisko and his crew had intervened, leaking a warning to the Cardassians, betraying the troop movements of a longstanding ally, and committing what the Klingon High Council had looked upon as an act of war.

The ship that had spirited the Detapa Council to safety had been  _U.S.S. Defiant_. But what caused Julian greater unease was that he himself had been the first to protest the idea of allowing the Klingon fleet to proceed unhindered. It had gnawed at him over the last eighteen months: the idea that by raising his voice in conscience he might have been the catalyst to what was proving to be a drawn-out and bloody war.

And there was no way of knowing, with how little Starfleet understood about the infrastructure and mechanisms of Klingon intelligence-gathering, how much of this General Martok might know. Would he recognize Julian's name? He would certainly recognize his posting, and the deduction that a key member of the senior staff of Deep Space Nine had been involved in the efforts to thwart him that day was almost impossible to avoid. There was even a chance that he knew what had been said in the wardroom before and during Captain Sisko's unorthodox way of passing along the information to the Cardassian government.

The Klingon code of honour was very clear about the responsibility to revenge oneself upon one's enemies. Julian had good reason to fear Martok, and he would have to guard his words. At least he wouldn't have to watch his back, he told himself, although he still couldn't quite bring himself to peel it away from the door. Klingons did not strike from behind.

Then again, they'd had no compunctions about lying in ambush, invisible to eyes and sensors alike behind their cloaking devices. Commander Worf had put it quite succingtly:  _in war, there is nothing more honourable than victory._

Martok was sitting on the edge of the bench now, having just pulled on his boots with the curved talon on each toe. He lifted his mass of luxuriant black hair and slid on the last of his accoutrements: a fat cylindrical chain that clasped in front. He planted a hand on each knee and exhaled expansively, front fangs parted but molars clenched.

"That…" he said ponderously; "is better."

No one spoke. Kalenna and Parvok had moved back to their bunks. Tain seemed fascinated by his own hands as he twiddled his thumbs like a fidgeting six-year-old. The Breen lay on their back, the brow lights of their helmet running their steady rainbow course. Julian was still pressed against the door.

The Klingon looked around at his fellow prisoners, then hoisted himself to his feet. Again he moved stiffly, every motion guarded. Julian could not help trying to diagnose what he saw. Disseminated myalgia was obvious, whether due to trauma or sustained disuse while in solitary confinement it was impossible to judge. He had a restricted range of motion in his left leg, and Julian wished he had been more observant during the trek back to the barracks. The assessment would have been easier without the armour.

Martok stumped to the back of the cell, stopping just short of Enabran Tain's knees. Klingons had little regard for personal space, and Cardassians tended to have an even larger encroachment threshold than humans. Tain should have felt viscerally uncomfortable to have the warrior so near, but he seemed completely unaffected. His rolling thumbs did not so much as stutter in their rhythm, and he looked amiably up at Martok as the Klingon held out his left hand imperiously, palm up.

Tain did not seem to know what he wanted. Martok made a tight, thrusting motion with his hand, once again making that low growling sound behind his adenoids:  _aaaaaah!_  Finally he said, enunciating expansively; "Give it to me."

Tain smiled boredly as he unlaced his fingers, but Julian thought he could see a flash of irritation pass over his stark Cardassian features. Tain reached across his lap and used his right hand to yank back the corner of his mattress. His left fished beneath, and emerged with a strange-looking length of metal, about twenty centimetres in length. On one end, it was shaped to a right angle with a short appendage. The other end, tapering, was wrapped in a scrap of oily cloth. Tain slapped it down into Martok's hand, letting the pallet flap back into place. Not for a moment did he break eye contact with the Klingon.

Martok closed his fist around the bent end of the piece of metal as if gripping the hilt of a  _d'k tahg_  dagger. He stripped away the cloth with a quick flick of his wrist, revealing a jagged edge. He drew it across his left palm in a swift, forceful motion, and raised a line of blood. Defiantly, he overturned his hand and let several drops fall to the floor. He looked pointedly at Kalenna, jerking his chin as if making satisfied point, and then handed the tool back to Tain.

The Cardassian sighed theatrically. "We can all vouch for each other, you know," he said. "You're the one who's been away from the group."

Martok's single eye narrowed. "And if you have all been replaced?" he rumbled.

Tain chuckled, but used the tip of the piece of scrap to saw across the base of his last two fingers. He held his hand up, brow ridge lifted pointedly.

Martok brushed his own finger against the Cardassians, sweeping up the blood. He smeared it with his thumb, and smelled it. Then he moved to Parvok.

Julian understood what they were doing, of course. Blood screenings had become a standard precaution throughout the Alpha Quadrant. When blood left a solid body, it retained its properties and appearance as it began to clot. When any part of a Changeling's body was separated from it, it reverted at once to a gelatinous morphagenic state. So a small quantity of blood removed from a host was empiric evidence that he, she, or they was not a Founder. His own preferred method involved a hypospray and a sterile vacutainer, but the Klingon technique — which the General himself had introduced to Deep Space Nine just before the invasion of Cardassia — was straightforward and efficient. And, Julian reflected as he watched Parvok raise a bubble of green ichor with the edge of what looked like a scavenged shard of scrap, more adaptable to these primitive circumstances.

He only hoped it was more foolproof than his own method, which was effective only when the Changeling wasn't the one operating the hypospray. They had run into that problem once before, on the  _Defiant_. Julian had spent a frantic hour trying to break himself out of a sealed cabin while the Changeling who had trapped him there meandered about the ship wearing his face and performing blood screenings on the staff.

That memory awoke a sudden wave of nausea. His empty stomach churned and his vision blurred briefly. That had only been an hour, and the Changeling had managed to frame an innocent man as an enemy saboteur. Julian's new replacement (he skirted around the thought that it might be his  _permanent replacement_ ) had already been living his life for a couple of days. Longer, since he had no way of knowing how long he'd been sedated. What damage could it do in that amount of time?

Kalenna had the length of metal now, and she let Martok wet his fingers in her blood. Then the Klingon turned on Julian.

"I'm not a Changeling," he protested quietly, knowing that was an absurd thing to say but needing to affirm it anyway. Was it possible to enhance the imagination via critical neural pathway manipulation? The spectre in his mind's eye of the shape-shifter strolling through the corridors of Deep Space Nine wearing his likeness was almost more vivid than the sight of the Klingon warrior standing defiantly less than a decimetre from his shoulder.

Julian pressed himself a little harder against the wall, not so much trying to withdraw from Martok as trying to make sure he could keep his feet while his thoughts left him week in the knees. His parietal plate thumped against the door. Turning his head ever so slightly so that he could look squarely at the Klingon, he held out his hand for the hunk of metal.

Instead of handing it over as he had done with the others, Martok seized Julian's hand with his own and sliced open his palm. The motion was swift and violent, not at all like the slow, ceremonial cutting that Klingons usually favoured — in their rituals as well as their blood screenings. As his nerve endings exploded in a cacophony of protest, Julian understood why. The edge of the tool, if the thing was worthy of such a lofty name, was not actually sharp enough for the task. Not without considerable force behind it, anyway. He could feel splinters of metal as they broke away to embed themselves in the edges of the wound.

Although he had been determined to take the screening as stoically as the others, Julian couldn't help a startled yelp of pain and affrontedness. He glared at the Klingon, supporting his own head again as he leaned forward and clutched his bleeding hand. The suddenness of the assault dissolved one more resolution: that to tread carefully around General Martok.

"Was that really necessary?" he demanded.

Martok tossed the piece of scrap aside, and it clattered onto the bench where he had dressed. He took hold of Julian's hand again, and scooped up a fingerful of blood. He walked away as he inspected it.

"Can't be too careful," he muttered. "Even the Tal Shiar have been infiltrated by the Founders: it would be nothing for them to plant a spy in one of their own prisons."

Julian's gaze flicked to Kalenna, whose expression was stonier than usual. Odo had passed on that tale as part of his report on the loss of the joint Romulan-Cardassian Fleet. The leader of the Tal Shiar's contingent had proved to be a Changeling. He wondered what the Major made of such a betrayal of her trust in her superior officer.

He wondered what his friends and colleagues were going to make of such a betrayal.

He broke away from the door at last, jolting towards the bench. He sat down and hitched up his hip, then laid his arm across his thigh and leaned in to examine the wound. Considering his blade, Martok had done exemplary work. The edges were only slightly jagged, and it was just deep enough to ensure a plentiful release of blood: not even a millimetre deeper. A couple of flakes of metal glittered in his skin, and Julian tried to tweeze them out with thumb and forefinger. But his nails, neatly pared down to the quick on his last morning in his infirmary, had not yet grown long enough to be useful in this regard. Biting back a noise of disgust at being driven to such straits, he splayed his fingers backward and retracted his lips. Lifting his bloody palm up to his mouth, he dug after the splinters with his teeth.

"As usual, we'll have to trust that our silent friend is what he appears to be," Martok was saying. He brushed past Julian to recover the improvised knife, and gave it back to Tain. "At least it will be easy to judge if his behaviour changes."

He was talking about the Breen, and not refraining from assumptions about their gender as Julian and Kalenna did. A fragment of medical trivia sorted itself out of the morass of chaos in the back of Julian's mind. The Breen had no blood. Starfleet Medical's files on the anatomy of the reclusive species were limited, but it was speculated that they employed some sort of tracheal breathing system for gas exchange. Since hemolymph would be just as useful as blood for the purposes of the screenings, either it couldn't be readily extracted from the circulatory chambers by the means available, or Breen physiology employed some sort of interstitial excretory pathway instead.

The last of the splinters were gone, and Julian let the back of his wrist rest against his lap. The wound was still bleeding sluggishly, but hemostasis was well under way. It was calming to run through the mechanism of human clotting in his mind. His platelets were activating and aggregating. The fibrin nets were forming where the vessels had been broken. The vessel walls themselves were constricting. If he'd had a dermal regenerator, he could have sealed the wound with a wave of his other hand, but his body was taking care of the problem in its own way.

He could help it along by sterilizing the wound. He started to stand, thinking of the alcove in the waste reclamation room. And then he sank back, momentarily apoplectic with frustration. He couldn't go down to the end of the pod: they were locked in for the night.

The taste of blood was hard and coppery on his tongue. Julian wiped at his mouth with the back of his left hand and grimaced as he ran his tongue along his teeth. They were beginning to feel fuzzy, in addition to the grit of congealing blood that he licked away. He didn't suppose the Dominion had thought of providing toothbrushes. The sonic variety might be modified in undesirable ways by the prisoners, but the old-fashioned abrasive kind would have been safe enough to issue. Julian Bashir, Secret Agent, kept one with nylon bristles on the marble countertop of his penthouse bathroom.

Julian sighed. It wasn't a lack of ingenuity that accounted for this oversight, and he knew it. It wasn't an oversight at all: just one more thing the Dominion could deny its prisoners to make their lives incrementally more unbearable. Not every species shared the human enthusiasm for or definition of oral hygiene, maybe — the Ferengi seemed to think it more important to sharpen teeth than to clean them, for instance. But Cardassians, at least, were fanatical about the practice. Or Garak was. Julian would have given a lot to hear his friend's voice just now. He'd probably tease, with his usual air of credulous but counterfeit innocence, but he'd follow that up with some sort of useful insight into how to adapt to all of this. Julian was beginning to think it was adapt or perish, and it was the small things that would slowly drive him mad.

( _fade_ )


	7. Twice Manipulated

_Note: Deep Space Nine employs the Bajoran Standard Day, which is 26 hours long. The customary approximations for other lengths of time are based on the same unit: so "39 hours" is shorthand for "a day and a half", "52 hours" is "two days", et cetera._

**Part II, Act II: Twice Manipulated**

"How long have I been gone?" Martok asked grimly. He was at the back of the cell now, shifting restlessly. He looked like he wanted to pace, but for some reason he was restraining himself.

"Two days," said Tain pleasantly, puffing out his chest a little as he nodded at Julian. "The good doctor joined us yesterday."

Martok's eye narrowed again as he studied Julian. "Doctor," he muttered. More forcefully he said; "Why is a Federation doctor in a Dominion prison camp? Is there war at last?"

He knew perfectly well that the war the Federation was fighting was against his people, not the Founders, but Julian knew better than to say it. "I wasn't captured in battle," he said. "I was taken."

"You'll want to hear this," Tain sang with relish. "Go on, Doctor. Tell him how you were  _taken_."

Julian furrowed his brows in an unspoken question. He knew that Tain saw it, but he had no intention of answering. He simply shrugged one shoulder ever so slightly and put on an expression of affable expectation. Julian shifted around the corner of the bench so that he could face the Klingon General more squarely.

"I was on Meezan IV, attending a medical conference." He had said these words often enough over the last thirty-nine hours, but they still stuck in his throat. His mouth was intolerably dry. Julian reached for his bottle of water and drank more deeply than was prudent. He was wretchedly thirsty, but he wasn't going to draw his first full ration until mealtime tomorrow. His stomach churned, and he remembered his hunger as well. He should have eaten his meal instead of letting his horror get the better of him.

"And?" Tain drawled pointedly.

"And nothing," Julian said tightly. "I went to my room one night after the keynote reception, and I woke up here. I'd been drugged — I still don't know with what."

That thought brought another flutter of panic. He'd thought he had moved past that along with the withdrawal symptoms, but apparently he hadn't. Julian had not just been belligerent when he'd told the Vorta there could be long-term sequelae from certain anesthetics, but that wasn't the bottom of his well of unease.

There was a low, rumbling noise of recognition. Martok's lone eye was wide, his expression one of knowing anger.

"I see why you would think me interested, Tain," he said.

"Not really," the Cardassian chuckled. "There's more."

Martok's head whipped to look at him. "More?" he said suspiciously.

"What are you driving at?" Julian asked, frowning at Tain. He had the uncanny feeling that he was being driven towards something, herded by a master manipulator trying to engineer some mysterious end. But like an actor thrust unprepared into the spotlight, he had no idea what the director was trying to get out of him.

When the Cardassian gave no answer, Martok made a low noise of annoyance. Impatiently, he offered what he believed to be an explanation.

"There are only a few who were taken in such a… dishonourable fashion," he said. "You are one, as am I. I was taken from my camp on Kang's Summit. I was hunting sabre bear — a journey of contemplation and preparation before I assumed my new command, or so I thought. Little did I know the hunter was himself hunted."

"I see." The words were a breath of comprehension. It made perfect, awful sense: Martok had been replaced by a Changeling, and so had Julian. It was only logical that the Dominion had extracted both of them in the same way. Had they been doing this throughout the Alpha Quadrant all year?

"To be drugged like an animal and carried away by night… it is a grave dishonour," Martok said blackly. "If I could find the ones who did this to me, I would wring my vengeance from their lifeless bodies."

Julian appreciated the sentiment, but his own first step would be to interrogate them for every detail of his treatment at their hands. Again, the irrational panic rose up. What had they done without his knowledge or consent? What had they given him or taken from him or changed about him while he slept?

"Tell him, Doctor," Tain coaxed, his voice lilting as if he were prompting a child to recount some delightful tale brought home from school.

Julian's patience with this behaviour broke. "I've just told him," he snapped. "If there's something you think I've left out, feel free to let us all in on the big secret."

"Oh, no, I wouldn't dream of it!" Tain puffed, indignant at the very thought. "It's your story, Doctor. Tell him what happened when you got here."

Julian didn't understand. Was Tain talking about waking under Major Kalenna's watchful eyes? The Cardassians who had tried to steel his boots? The events in the combat ring this afternoon?

"Tell him what Deyos told you about the reason you were taken," Tain said finally, his voice losing some of its goodnatured prodding. This was an order, and he wouldn't ask so nicely next time.

Now Julian knew what he was driving at, but he didn't want to comply. Saying it aloud would only make the whole thing more real. Particularly because Martok's replacement by a Founder was very tangible, very concrete: something established and widely witnessed and objectively true. Up until this moment, some part of Julian's mind had been able to cling to the idea that his own replacement was still just a hypothetical situation.

"What did that soulless  _p'tak_ say to you?" Martok growled, spitting out the invective with a vitriol that Julian found strangely vindicating.

"He told me I've been replaced," he said. It took every iota of control he had over his breath and his body and his emotions to speak the words calmly and clinically. They came out flat and leaden, and seemed to drain the life out of the cell. "There's a Changeling back in the Alpha Quadrant pretending to be me. It's probably on its way to Dee—" He hesitated, remembering just in time that the revelation of his posting would mean the General's instant enmity. So far, the Klingon had overlooked the state of war between his forces and Starfleet, but those blinders surely had their limitations.

"On its way to my posting," Julian rephrased. "Once there, the Founder will have access to all key facilities and enormous quantities of classified information."

"Replaced?" Martok echoed, shock in his voice. "Deyos told you this?"

"He took great pleasure in telling me," said Julian. "He must be certain there's nothing I can do about it. No means of escape, or of warning my Captain."

"Taken…" Martok breathed. "And  _replaced_."

Something about the way he said this, and about the crawling horror now creasing the Klingon's craggy features made the last piece of the puzzle fall into place. This was what Tain had sought: not to cajole Julian into saying all of this just to watch him writhe in the misery of it, but so that Martok would go through the throes he was experiencing now. Julian recognized them: the blissful state in which such a thing was unimaginable was shattered, giving way to first disbelief, then denial, and finally horrified comprehension.

"Then I…" Martok spat. His lips contorted painfully. His one eye was fixed on Julian, a gleaming looking-glass of desolation and rage. "There could be a  _Founder_  in my place as well? On the  _Negh'Var_? On  _Q'onos_? In the halls of my home?"

"You didn't know," Julian said numbly. His dislike of Tain deepened. The Cardassian had known this was new information: it had been new to him as well, after all. And for some reason he had wanted Martok to find out this way. If he had confided in Julian, the doctor could have found a tactful way to explain the situation. He could have briefed Martok properly, instead of blindsiding him with the truth. Seeing how he had been used, Julian had to battle a red tide of seething anger so that he could salvage this situation.

"You were replaced," he said, finding the calm voice that he used when it was time to give a patient the worst of prognoses. He held back the gentleness, knowing no Klingon would welcome that, but the empathy remained. He explained as clearly as he knew how. "The Changeling that replaced you was feeding advice about the war to Chancellor Gowron; agitating violent sentiment. But it's dead now. It was exposed, and executed by the members of the Order of the Bat'leth."

Martok jerked his head sharply, pulled abruptly out of his dismay. "Executed by the Order of the Bat'leth?" he said, darkly pleased. "Then it can do no further harm to the Empire?"

"No," Julian agreed. "It happened about six months ago. Since then, you've been presumed dead."

Six months and more in this forsaken place… how had Martok survived it? Julian's blood ran cold at the thought.

"And what did it do before that?" Martok muttered, at last giving in to the temptation to pace. He swept past Tain and down towards Parvok's cot. Julian twisted at waist and neck to track him with his eyes. "To be replaced by the enemy, to have your face used as a weapon against the Empire… it is an abomination!"

He was talking to himself more than to any one of them, and Julian let him do it. He knew the turmoil now roiling in the Klingon's heart, and he thought the best thing to do was to give him the latitude to work through it on his own.

But then Martok threw back his head in a savage, thundering roar that shook the pipe frames of the empty cots and reverberated off the tritanium wall plating. He slammed his fist into the barracks door with sundering force, and howled again. The door remained unhurt, but Julian didn't like to think about the state of the Klingon's knuckles.

Parvok was sitting stiff as a board, looking desperate to flee but unable to do so. Kalenna had startled at the first ululation of anguished rage, but she had recovered her composure rapidly. Tain was on his feet now, calmly shaking out his blanket. As Bashir stared at him, he bent to plump up his pillow.

Martok was seething, his chest heaving beneath his armour. He slapped each palm against the door and hung his head between spasming shoulders. He reared back then, and Julian was afraid he meant to slam his vaulted forehead against the door next. He leapt to his feet and braced his shoulder under Martok's right arm. He slid his own between the Klingon and the door, using his left hand to try to push Martok back.

"That's enough," he said firmly. It was his doctor's voice again, settling an agitated patient with reason and competence. "You'll hurt yourself, or you'll bring the guards. Either way, it won't improve matters."

"I do not fear the  _guards_ ," Martok hissed in contempt. His eyes narrowed. "You. It was you who made them draw back. They would have killed me, and you made them draw back."

He sounded like all this was just coming back to him now, out of the fog of a dream. Julian remembered thinking he looked like someone in the throes of a panic attack, only moved to blinding rage instead of terror. Perhaps he had been right.

"I told them you weren't in your right mind, and that hemming you in was making it worse," said Julian. "I don't know how Klingons cope with solitary confinement, but I imagine it didn't leave you very rational."

"Rational!" Martok scoffed. He pushed off the door, stepping backward and looking Bashir over with an exaggerated sweep of the head. "In the dark and the stillness, what cause has a warrior to be  _rational_?"

"Well, you're out of the stillness now," said Julian, calling the words after Martok as the Klingon stalked back to the far end of the barracks. "I can't let you batter yourself against the door."

Martok snarled and whirled to look at him again. There was a stark desperation in his eyes as he opened his mouth to speak: some terrible question hovering on his scarred lips. Then he froze. He glanced to the left, obliged to turn his head to do so because he no longer had an eye on that side. He looked at Tain, now lying languidly on his side and watching the proceedings with idle interest. Martok closed his mouth and shook his head fiercely, and a low noise of discontent rumbled in the back of his throat.

"We will talk, Doctor," he promised ominously. "But not tonight."

"Fine," Julian said, with more confidence than he felt. His palm was itching, and he resisted the urge to brush away the crust of the new clots. "Perhaps you should lie down and get some rest."

He nodded to the empty cot nearest the door. Martok looked at it and curled his lip disdainfully. Julian remembered Jadzia mentioning that Klingons eschewed soft furnishings, though Commander Worf didn't seem to have a problem with Starfleet beds.

"Or on one of the benches?" he suggested, raising his eyebrows to invite a response.

The General's eye narrowed thoughtfully as he studied Julian's face. It took considerable self-control not to shrink under that scrutiny. Would Martok recognize him? They had never met face-to-face, but during the days when the Klingon fleet had surrounded Deep Space Nine, the Promenade had been awash with warriors. Julian's position on the station's busy thoroughfare of commerce and culture made him conspicuous. Martok might have observed him without reciprocity.

But he only tilted his head back in acknowledgement. "You know something of our ways," he said. "Not many Starfleet officers can say the same."

Julian knew he couldn't afford to let himself become complacent, but if this tacit approval was enough to get him through the night, he was grateful.

 _(fade_ )

It was a long night. Julian laid down, his tired body relieved to stretch out again, but he could not sleep. At first, he couldn't get comfortable. Lying as he had before made his knee pulse and throb maddeningly, but rolling onto his other side meant turning his back on the slumbering hulk of General Martok, within arm's reach on the bench. He tried lying on his back, but he'd never been able to sleep that way. Finally, Julian got up and moved the wretched, sour-smelling little pillow to the other end of the cot so that he could lie with his feet to the door. That allowed him to settle on his left side facing into the room, which solved the two proximal problems but still left him lying on a thin foam mattress that didn't adequately distribute the pressure-points of the webbing beneath, and a bunk frame that squeaked irately every time he shifted even slightly.

And he was thirsty, intolerably thirsty. His palate felt like it had been coated with sandpaper, and his tongue was swollen and sticky. He tried to ignore it, reminding himself that it was temporary: he would draw a full ration of water tomorrow, and he owed none of it to anyone. But then the thought that he was coveting two litres of unpleasant-tasting water would rise up and smack him with the desperation and humiliation of his situation. No one should have to obsess over the bare necessities of life, but that was precisely what he was doing. And the Dominion had to know that was the inevitable result of their rationing system. They had laid this trap deliberately, and he was caught in it.

Finally, he caved to the temptation to open his bottle. By his estimate, he had less than three hundred millilitres left, and it had to last through the rest of the night and most of the morning. He drank anyway, savouring every drop. He didn't care about the unpleasant aftertaste. At least it washed away the last of the blood from between his teeth.

Then he began to notice the cold, which was a permanent fixture of this place but easy to ignore while he was up and moving about. Now he was motionless, and his body temperature was dropping to its nocturnal nadir, and no matter how tightly he drew the coarse blanket about him, he couldn't get warm. The Starfleet uniform was supposed to be adaptable to a reasonable range of temperatures, but it wasn't doing its job tonight.

Julian might have expected the heat generated by six sleeping bodies to take the edge off — but it didn't. Romulans, like Vulcans, ran cooler than humans. Julian didn't know if the Breen's refrigeration suit was actually lowering the temperature of the air around it, but it certainly wasn't contributing to a net warming. And Cardassians, though not precisely cold-blooded in a truly reptilian sense, did not have the same mechanisms for metabolic thermoregulation that humans did. Julian and Martok were the only representatives of genuinely hot-blooded species in the room.

If Julian was cold, Tain was probably freezing, and yet he slumbered on. He wheezed in his sleep: a thin, splenic sound that Julian didn't much like. There was something wrong with the aged spymaster, something physical. He was hiding it well, but he couldn't conceal every symptom — not from the eyes of a doctor who had made a study of Cardassian physiology. So Julian fretted about that next, wondering how he was going to broach the subject and what Tain would do when he did.

Finally he did doze off for a while, after a fashion. At least, the manic whirling of his thoughts settled down into vacant apathy and the grey barracks room grew dimmer before his eyes. The lights only seemed to have one level, which was probably another reason sleep eluded him. But at least he was able to drift, chilled and uncomfortable but not really in pain, until he started to believe he might actually be able to sleep.

But then the thirst flared up afresh, and the cycle began all over again.

( _fade_ )

He must have fallen asleep at last, because he awoke to the unpleasant sensation of being shaken by the shoulder. Julian squinted up at Parvok, and then scrubbed his eyes with the back of his thumb. His palm smarted and his left flank ached.

"Time for the count?" he croaked, his dry tongue clicking. Parvok nodded.

"Soon," he said.

Julian sat up slowly. He was groggy and sluggish, and his head ached fiercely. The others were already up and gone, their cots neatly made in preparation for the inspection. Julian's bleary eyes slid across the way to Enabran Tain's cot, under which he had hidden the piece of metal last night. Had it been there the whole time? Was it there still? If so, it seemed the guards did not make a search of the room when they inspected it. He wondered why they hadn't tried to scavenge some tool that would be easier to hide. Klingons had a flair for the dramatic, but all that was really needed for a successful blood screening was a pinprick. Julian decided he would have to find a tactful way to point that out. The risk of being caught with such a substantial weapon were too great.

As he stood, he felt a twinge in the small of his back. He rubbed at it, but even as his hand was moving he knew it wasn't a muscle spasm. It was deeper and somehow keener, and although not more than a six on the pain scale, it brought with it a sickening churning of his empty stomach. It wasn't a consequence of the uncomfortable cot: it was his kidney.

Julian drank the last of his water hurriedly, because it was the only thing he could do to help the situation. He had to hope that it was nothing more than the pangs of dehydration. The differential diagnoses that rattled through his mind was accurate but frightening: drug-induced nephrotoxicity, small vessel thrombosis, glomerulonephritis. He wouldn't put himself at any measurable risk of a kidney stone, but then again, without knowing what had been done to him in transit from Meezan IV, he could not be sure.

Parvok was watching him, shifting unhappily on the balls of his feet. Julian eyed him wearily. "I'm coming," he promised, raking a hand through his hair. It was tangled and dishevelled, the curl more prominent than usual.

The Romulan shook his head. "The bed," he hissed. "There isn't much time!"

Julian looked at his cot. The pillow was squashed and misshapen, and the blanket lay tangled where he had thrown it off, one corner trailing onto the floor. He grimaced thinly. He had thought about the inspection as it related to the risk of a search, but he had forgotten his own obligations in that regard. Did the Jem'Hadar insist on uniformly-made beds as part of their general philosophy of perfect order, or could they possibly know how restrictive and almost infantilizing the edict felt? With the exception of his first two weeks at the Academy, when the practice was part of several exercises meant to emphasize Earth's military heritage and the idea of routine discipline, Julian hadn't been  _commanded_  to make his bed since he was a small boy.

He made it now, however, hurriedly but with mathematical precision. He might have been willing to tweak the noses of the Jem'Hadar just to make himself feel better about being robbed of agency, but he wasn't willing to risk consequences for his cellmates. These five people were all from worlds that had uneasy relationships with the Federation, but here, far away from Starfleet and his comrades-in-arms, Tain and the others were the closest thing he had to allies. He had no intention of costing them suffering or loss of privileges — if indeed anything they were permitted here could be considered a  _privilege_.

Julian made it out of the barracks just as the klaxon sounded, and had to hasten into the inspection line. Again, he was forced to the front, but this time he found himself standing with General Martok — who seemed to share neither the other prisoners' desire for anonymity nor their dread of the lighted arena before him.

The count started just as yesterday's had, with the Vorta emerging from the administration pod with his escort of Jem'Hadar. Because he was dawdling, again "losing count" whenever he made a cold, jeering remark to a prisoner, the job took longer than it had to. Julian escaped comment this time, but Deyos curled his lip at Martok.

"Back with us again, General," he said with false grace. "I hope you've learned your lesson. Will you be obliging the Jem'Hadar this afternoon?"

Julian was on Martok's blind side, but he imagined that the General's eye was boring into Deyos's face.

"Today is a good day to die," he growled in his deep, hoarse and somehow melodious voice.

Deyos smiled luxuriantly. It did not reach his eyes. "No," he said chillingly. "Not for you."

He walked on, apparently so satisfied with the exchange that he did not bother with the pretext of starting the count afresh. Six pairs further down, he stopped again, pausing in silence for an especially long time. Without turning his head, Julian could not see the prisoner who warranted such scrutiny, but he could see the clinical curiosity on the Vorta's face as he watched his prey.

When Deyos spoke this time, it was with a clipped cadence that made a sentence of every word. "Stand. Up. Straight."

Across the way, some of the Cardassians were shifting uneasily where they stood. Julian's pulse quickened with an awful premonition.

"You," Deyos said, flicking a finger at the man directly in front of him. "Step out of the line."

The prisoner hesitated. Apparently this was not a familiar order.

"Step out and take your place at the end of the line," Deyos elucidated, his voice tightening with disdainful irritation.  _How can a sentient being be so stupid_ , that tone asked.

One of the Romulan prisoners side-stepped the Vorta, abandoning his place in line. He tried to move with military dignity, but his pace quickened after the first two steps. He scurried up the line and fell in on Julian's left side. He was rigid from head to foot as he resumed his squared-off stance.

Deyos nodded into the gap. "Bring him forward," he commanded.

First Ikat'ika reached with one arm, and grabbed the prisoner in the rear line by one shoulder, drawing him firmly forward. It did not look like an unduly brutal gesture, which surprised Julian, but the man on the receiving end stumbled. Now the doctor did turn his head, forgetting himself, and his worst fear was confirmed.

It was the Cardassian who had stolen his boots, the one who was now fighting the pain of broken ribs and his myriad other injuries. He was stooped markedly to the left, one arm clutched tightly across his chest.

"I'll not warn you again," Deyos said brightly.

The Cardassian looked at him with glassy eyes. He was breathing laboriously through his teeth. The improvised dressing was still on his head, plastered in place by a dark clot.

All the other prisoners were trying to keep their bodies still and their eyes front. Julian found himself drifting slightly out of the line, taking a quarter-step forward. He was already looking in the wrong direction. What did a little more deviation matter?

"Soldiers, correct his posture," Deyos said boredly. He stepped away from the swaying Cardassian, beckoning to Ikat'ika. "One hundred twenty-two," he said, indicating the next pair of prisoners.

The two Jem'Hadar who had been behind the First swooped in on the Cardassian. One of them brandished his rifle, clubbing the Cardassian in the stomach with the butt. The other one clouted the side of his head. All the air exploded from the prisoner's lungs, and with it a strangled, wheezing noise that should have been a scream of anguish. He crumpled, falling forward onto the inner shoulders of the two soldiers. They struck him again.

"No!" Julian shouted, horrified. He sprang out of his place in line and sprinted towards them, shoving aside one of the Jem'Hadar. The guard had not been expecting an assault from that quarter, and he took a stilted step to catch himself before he could fall. The Cardassian, however, crashed to the ground, and the other Jem'Hadar raised his rifle again. This time it looked like he was about to bring the butt down on the back of the Cardassian's skull.

Julian had danced nimbly out of the way of his felled patient. Now he lunged in and caught the Jem'Hadar's forearm with both hands, arresting the fall of the weapon. He pushed with all his might, trying to get the guard away from the man now wheezing on the floor. Instead, the Jem'Hadar dropped his shoulder and twisted, upsetting Julian's balance. While he tried to compensate, the heavy power cell casing at the back of the plasma rifle flew up and blasted into the side of his head with concussive force.

Julian fell, sprawling, and landed hard on his left shoulder and hip. The bruises he'd gotten on his first day protested this rough treatment, and his arms curled around his head in reflexive defence. The first guard had recovered his wits, and was now kicking the Cardassian while blows rained down on him from above. Julian struggled to rise, but the second guard was ready for that. An armoured knee came up into the hollow of his chest, and his breath exploded out of him in a primal grunt.

Through eyes still blurred by the coup-contrecoup rattling of his brain against the inside of his skull, Julian saw the rifle rise again. He tried to scramble out of its path, fighting to draw in a lungful of air, but his limbs wouldn't obey him. They scrabbled against the smooth, composite floor, and one of his boots slipped as if in a puddle of something. He caught himself with his elbows before his face could smash to earth, but although he braced himself for the blow that was coming, it never came.

Over the tidal roar in his ears, he heard Deyos said; "Bring the human. Leave the other one. First Ikat'ika, you complete the count."

Scaly hands seized each of Julian's arms, and he was hauled to his feet. He tried to get them under him, but the Jem'Hadar did not wait: they started to drag him down the line of prisoners. He writhed against their bone-bruising grasp, unable to quite figure out how to keep his head from hanging between his shoulders. But he planted the sole of his boot at last, and managed to push off steadily enough to get the other leg moving. By the time the familiar face of Enabran Tain slid past the fog in his peripheral vision, Julian was stumbling along beside the guards.

There was only one Jem'Hadar at the force-field today: his partner was probably busy helping with inspection. There was a static crackle as the field fell for Deyos, and another as it sprang back into existence behind Julian. He fought against the biological imperative to lose consciousness and the thunderous pain in his skull as he was manhandled across the threshold into the Vorta's office. He could not quite straighten himself: his legs felt rubbery, and the Jem'Hadar had an adamantine grip on his arms, keeping him stooped. But Julian raised his head at last, not quite halfway, and forced his eyes to focus as Deyos strode behind his desk.

Blood was trickling into the corner of his right eye, and because he could not figure out how to breathe through his nose, his mouth hung open. The Vorta looked at him thoughtfully and flicked an invisible fleck of dust from one of his computer pylons.

"Now then,  _Doctor_ ," he said with serpentine relish. "What ever are we going to do with you?"

( _fade_ )


	8. Conditions of Practice

** Part II, Act III: Conditions of Practice **

Julian did not answer. He was not entirely sure he  _could_  answer, but in any case he wouldn't have wanted to. He had a feeling he was in for the worst of it now.  _Vital identifiers_ , he reminded himself, trying to quell his panic. They were only entitled to his vital identifiers.

Deyos was watching him as one might watch a curious laboratory specimen.

"It's a shame when you're trying so hard to stand," he said; "but I really do think I prefer you on your knees. Sixth?"

The Jem'Hadar on his right swept one foot in a tight arc, and Julian crashed to his knees as his feet were kicked out from under him. The hands on his arms released at exactly the right moment to be sure he felt the full force of the impact into his hips and spine, and a quantum torpedo of anguish erupted in his right knee. Julian began to crumple forward, curling in on himself with an inarticulate noise of suffering, but one of the guards seized a handful of his hair instead. His head was jerked back and he was not allowed to fall any farther. The resulting pain in his scalp was superficial compared to the eruption in his leg or the pulsar of agony where the rifle butt had struck, but it was somehow far more distracting. Julian tried to shrink away, instinctively — but of course, that only intensified the burning.

"My name is Bashir, Julian," he said, his words slurring a little but not as badly as he had feared. The chief problem was that he was still trying to draw a full breath. He was panting. "Lieutenant. Chief Medical Officer on Deep Space Nine. Serial number SB-6—"

Deyos clicked his tongue. "No need for that," he chided. "The Dominion already knows all it needs to know about you, Doctor. You really don't think we'd send a Founder in to take your place without your  _serial number_ , do you?"

The disinterested mockery in his voice was worse than any threat would have been. Julian felt his cheeks burn with anger… and embarrassment? Was this warmongering bureaucrat actually making him feel ashamed?

He drove back the thought.  _You're better than that. You're a Starfleet Officer. Pull yourself together_. But he was dazed and afraid, and that was not so easy to do.

"I don't want your secrets," Deyos went on, meandering down the length of his desk and tapping a stylus against the opposite palm. "We have them all, you see. Service record, duty logs. Personal logs, medical records. Vaccination history, metabolic baseline values, brain wave patterns. Even your childhood schoolwork." He paused and turned to smile silkily at Julian. "There are no secrets from the Dominion."

Julian wondered if that were true. If they knew everything,, why was Deyos only listing materials they could have obtained by hacking into a couple of key Federation databases? One of them, the Universal Primary and Secondary Schooling Archive, wasn't even particularly secured. He wondered if they'd noticed that the UPSSA had no class work on file for him before the second grade.

"No." Deyos emerged from behind the desk again. He strolled up to Julian and leaned in over him. "What I want is an  _explanation_."

"An explanation?" Julian echoed thickly. His head wobbled dizzyingly, and the Jem'Hadar's grip on his hair tightened. "Of what?"

"Of your behaviour, of course," said Deyos, raising his eyebrows to show that this should be self-explanatory. "That's twice in twelve hours you've tried to prevent the guards from attending to their duties."

"They were beating an injured man," protested Julian quietly. "He couldn't stand up straight because your Eighth cracked two ribs and fractured a sternal appendage."

"What is that man to you?" the Vorta asked, scornful and mystified at once. "He's a Cardassian, you're a human. He isn't even a member of your precious Federation."

"He's a patient," Julian whispered. He could not raise his eyes to look at Deyos: it hurt too much. He stared stonily ahead instead, past the Vorta's hip in its tailored jacket to the partition that divided the room.

"And what about the Klingon?" Deyos scoffed. "Your kind and his are at war. Sworn enemies. Yet you ran into a circle of armed Jem'Hadar to bring him out of his insanity."

The use of such a word to describe what he was now almost convinced had been a panic attack sickened Julian. And it was Enabran Tain who'd had the courage to address Martok's irrational state, anyhow. Julian had only been brave enough to scold the guards. But he endured the searing bolt of anguish it sent into his head to look up at the Vorta now, so that he could fix Deyos with his blackest glare.

"We might not be at war," he said scathingly; "if your spy hadn't agitated for ongoing violence. We might have resolved the hostilities after the first few battles, given half a chance."

Deyos laughed. "Ah, yes, blame the Dominion!" he trilled. "All the Alpha Quadrant's woes can be laid squarely at our door."

"It's beginning to look that way," spat Julian.

The Vorta's lips thinned and he nodded tightly at the second Jem'Hadar, and suddenly the first one was no longer holding Julian by the hair. A backhanded slap sent his chin slamming into his shoulder, and his dry mouth filled with oily blood. Dazed and lost in the pain, Julian scarcely felt it when Deyos gripped him by the chin and jerked his head straight again. The Vorta leaned in so that the tips of their noses nearly brushed.

"I will not have heroics in my camp," he hissed, barely above a whisper. "You will not interfere when the guards are disciplining another prisoner. If you want to swoop in afterwards and clean up the mess, I'll tolerate that,  _Doctor_ , up to a point. But the next 'patient' you try to spare from their punishment will be vaporized with a plasma rifle. Do I make myself clear?"

An uncontrollable tremor ripped through Julian's body. He knew the Vorta could feel it, and he wished he could get ahold of himself, but there was only so much that even a genetically manipulated mind could do. Under these stressors, both physical and mental, he was past his limit of control.

"Yes," he breathed, and his voice trembled, too.

Deyos smiled and cocked his head to one side. "All right, then," he said cheerfully, letting go of Julian's jaw with a little flourish. He backed away and rubbed his hands together. "Now, since you're new to the camp, I'll be lenient. You needn't thank me: I know it takes some time to adjust, and I've never watched a human adapt to our little environment before. You won't be punished for your insolence today. But if you make the same mistake a third time, I promise you there will be consequences."

He gestured to the Jem'Hadar, and suddenly Julian was dragged back onto his feet. He managed to muster the will to flex his ankles, and so achieved at least an illusion of dignity instead of hanging like a potato sack between the guards.

"Take him to the yard and let him get on with his day," said Deyos. "And remember, Doctor," he sang out as Julian was manhandled towards the door, stumbling in his attempts to propel himself; "if you're so eager to fight the Jem'Hadar, it  _can_  be arranged!"

( _fade_ )

Major Kalenna was waiting for him. She hung back as the Jem'Hadar marched their charge clear of the entrance to the administration pod. Julian fought to keep his feet when the hold on his arms was abruptly released, but his right knee felt like putty and his head was reeling and the ground tilted unsteadily beneath him. He swayed for a moment and then crumpled, crashing down onto his left knee and just managing to slide his right leg out behind him to spare the strained joint. His left palm slammed into the stone floor. It stung as it was scraped raw, but he landed in a huddled crouch instead of flat on his front.

The Tal Shiar operative squatted beside him, curling down to look at his face. It took Julian three attempts to lock his eyes with hers, but when he finally succeeded he was glad that he had made the effort. Her unreadable, ice-coloured eyes were a surprisingly steadying sight.

"Are you lucid, Doctor?" she asked. Her tone and her expression exuded efficient professionalism, but the hand that settled on his bruised shoulder was very gentle.

Julian tried to nod, but he only managed the slightest upward tilt before he was overtaken by a wave of almost unbearable nausea. He clamped his mouth shut against the bubble of burning hydrofluoride that rose almost instantly in the back of his throat. He forced it back down, screwing his eyes closed. Just what his stomach thought it could vomit up, he wasn't sure. He doubted his dehydrated body had let his nocturnal dose of water linger long unused.

"Can you walk?" Kalenna asked. She looked about her like a hunted animal, sharp eyes assessing the risks around them. Julian couldn't focus his field of vision beyond about a metre and a half, so he wasn't sure exactly what she saw. He could imagine though: the Jem'Hadar guards with their wicked-looking plasma rifles; other prisoners, curious or hostile; and the broad, open expanse of the atrium with its dearth of places to take shelter if something went wrong.

 _Yard_ , Julian thought distantly. Deyos had called it the  _yard_. He didn't much care for the word himself. It evoked images of disreputable salvage operations, piled high with the detritus of ruined lives, no doubt with an Orion slaver lurking somewhere in the shadows. Salvage operations, or a prison…

Well, then.  _That_  was a laugh.

"I can walk," Julian mumbled. His mouth was already beginning to swell where the Jem'Hadar had smacked him. He was too afraid to touch the side of his head. "I'm just… not entirely sure that I can stand."

Kalenna made a low sound deep in her throat. He probably would never have heard it if she hadn't been six centimetres from his face. It was another of those restrained Romulan expressions of politically imprudent emotion. He'd amused her. He was glad.

"Let's try," Kalenna said, once again coldly efficient. "I can fetch Sub-Lieutenant Parvok and the Breen to carry you if necessary, but that would mean leaving you here while I do so. And I do not think that would be wise."

She adjusted her position, dropping one knee out of her crouch for leverage, and shifting so that they were hip-to-hip. She drew Julian's left arm across her shoulders and he forced his fumbling fingers to find a firm grip on her far humerus. She snaked her right arm behind his back, anchoring her hand just below his ribs, and offered him her left across his body. He took it, hating how his right hand trembled. He was a surgeon. He prided himself on his steady hands.

"Ready?" asked Kalenna, watching him cautiously.

Julian pressed his lips tightly together. He knew better than to nod now, so he just gave his chin a tight little tuck and sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils.

"One, two," Kalenna said. Then the strain entered her voice as she said, "Three!" and began to rise.

Julian extended his left leg as smoothly as he could, focusing all of his intent upon his quadriceps and the muscle groups of his hip and lower abdomen. He could visualize the tensing of the fibres and the tug and torsion of the ligaments. He ran through the anatomy in his mind:  _rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, tensor fasciae latae, psoas major…_ The familiar litany allowed him to focus on the parts of his body actually needed to do the work, and to shut his mind to the protests of the damaged places that weren't. As they began to rise together, Kalenna leaning forcefully in towards him so that she could buoy him up, blind anguish blazed from the right side of his head and Julian almost lost his resolve to stay both upright and conscious.

So he went deeper, down to a cellular level. He visualized the action potentials and the sodium-potassium pump, the molecular mechanics that lay beneath the smallest movement of all vertebrates.  _Post-ganglionic fibre_ , a mocking voice sang out, nonsensical in this moment.  _Pre-ganglionic nerve._ Cringing away from this memory, from the moment he had conclusively proved himself a fraud, Julian tried to remember the point of all of this.

Kalenna's hip thumped against his as she tried to hitch him higher with the hand that held his ribs. Dull, hot pain suffused his chest and Julian grunted, but he was upright now and he intended to stay that way. His right leg, dragged uselessly along for the ride as he rose, now found its footing. He tightened his grip on Kalenna's hand, hoping she would understand that he was ready to walk.

She understood. She seemed to be very good at this. She braced him but did not restrict him as he leaned on her like a living crutch. He was limping, and fighting off a pernicious vertigo, but they moved almost quickly up the length of the atrium towards the shelter of Barracks 6.

( _fade_ )

Nothing was broken. Julian lay on his back on the uncomfortable cot, his left hand splayed over his diaphragm and his right covering his eyes. His elbow, sticking awkwardly up into the air, had found some vital balancing point so that he didn't seem to be holding his arm up at all: it was suspended somehow between its own weight and the tension of his sleeve… or something like that. He didn't know. He didn't much care. Nothing was broken.

The abrasions on his palm and the cut above his eyebrow were minor. He had some intercostal bruising where the Jem'Hadar had slammed a knee into his chest. It was going to get worse before it improved, and Julian expected he'd be breathing into the pain in under an hour. There was a grotesque but superficial hematoma blossoming under his scalp where he'd caught the rifle-butt, but the skull beneath was still intact. Miles would probably have supplied a wisecrack about what a blockhead he was — a thought that was simultaneously comforting and gut-wrenching. Would Julian ever again have the chance to roll his eyes at one of his friend's good-natured jibes?

He closed his mind to that intolerable possibility. It was better to focus on the small mercies. There was no doubt at all that he had gotten off lightly: Deyos had indeed been lenient. The first thing Julian had asked, when he was lying down and the vertigo had faded enough to allow for speech, was what had happened to the fallen Cardassian. An uneasy Parvok had explained that his cellmates had taken him back to Barracks 22, and were standing guard at the door. Word had gone out that the human doctor was not welcome within. That was mortifying and galling: nothing left him more frustrated and helpless than being denied access to a patient in need. But he wasn't wanted and it was probably better for his own safety, much though it pained Julian to admit it.

Something cold and convex brushed the back of his hand. Julian spread his fingers, peeping out between them. The lights never varied in their intensity, but he was constantly surprised by how different their level seemed with the changing context. If he tried to study the cut on his palm, they were too dim. If he tried to sleep, they were too bright. Just at present, they were practically blinding.

Kalenna was unscrewing the cap off the prison-issue canteen. "Finish it," she said, lowering the vessel so that its lip was more on the level with Julian's mouth. "It will be wasted otherwise."

He had forgotten the last few swallows of water left of his ration. He rubbed at his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose briefly, and then raised his head a few centimetres off the pummelled pillow so that he could guide the vessel to his lips. Kalenna held it, supporting most of the weight and watching with a curious quietude as he drank.

Almost immediately, Julian wished he hadn't bothered. All that the pitiful measure of fluid did was to stir up the taste of blood and bile in his mouth, and awaken the demon of ferocious, unslakable thirst. And the effort of lifting his head had set his bruised skull pulsing again. He screwed his eyes tightly shut, pressing his lips together and closing his left hand over a fistful of his uniform as the room undulated miserably around him.

He wanted to sleep it off, but he knew that wasn't wise. Not because of the old myth about keeping a patient awake after a head injury — in the absence of signs of intracranial hemorrhage, the inverse was actually best practice so that the brain could rest and heal — but because he couldn't monitor his condition while he slept. A quick pass with a tricorder would have told him everything he needed to know about what was going on behind the thrumming pain above his ear, for better or for worse, but without that most basic diagnostic tool, he was reduced to symptomatic assessments. He didn't even have a mirror to confirm his pupil reactivity, so he had been making do with quick cognition checks.

He was running one now, like a computer executing a Level 3 diagnostic in the background while routine functions continued. The usual convention of counting by sevens was pointless in his case: Julian suspected his brain would be capable of that computation even in the advanced stages of coma. He listed Fibonacci numbers backwards from the fiftieth instead. Usually he avoided this kind of cerebral acrobatics because they were an unflinching reminder of his unnaturalness. But all things bent to medical necessity, and this was no exception.

"When you are ready, Parvok will help you out into the common space," Kalenna said.

Julian blinked at her.  _Sixty-three million, two hundred forty-five thousand, nine hundred eighty six. Thirty-nine million, eighty-eight thousand, one hundred sixty-nine_. What was she talking about?

"It's almost mealtime," Kalenna said. There was the subtlest tint of condescension in her voice, as if she were speaking to a rather dull child whose feelings she was trying not to hurt.

 _Twenty-four million, one hundred fifty-seven thousand, eight hundred seventeen._  Julian remembered often being on the receiving end of that kind of… could you call it consideration? It was mortifying. He wasn't incompetent. He hadn't forgotten about the daily distribution of rations.

Had he?  _Fourteen million, nine hundred thirty thousand, three hundred fifty-two_.

"If it's all the same to you," he said, closing his eyes again and willing the ringing in his right ear to stop; "I think I'll just stay here."

"It is all the same to me," the Major said crisply. It was her very best representative-of-the-Tal-Shiar professional voice. "But if you want your water ration, you will have to go and fetch it. The Jem'Hadar will not issue more than two bottles to any prisoner for any reason. I do not know the human physiological threshold for dehydration, but if you were a Romulan, I would be concerned for your continued health."

That was a difficult admonition to overlook, because Julian  _did_  know the Romulan physiological threshold for dehydration, and it was a lot higher than a human's.  _Nine million, two hundred twenty-seven thousand, four hundred sixty-five_. Like Vulcans, Romulans possessed a highly efficient system for fluid exchange and conservation. They did not sweat. They could endure far longer without water than any human, and could make do with far less. No doubt that was why Kalenna had felt able to spare him half her ration on his first day in the camp.

Sitting up was slow and painful work. Julian was down to 121,393 by the time he was upright on the edge of his cot, his left arm hugged to his bruised ribs. Really, once you got down into the five-digit numbers the Fibonacci sequence was no longer much of a mental exercise, so he let it go. He tipped his whole head backward so that he could look up at Kalenna.

"Are my pupils equal?" he asked, his respirations ragged with pain and exertion.

Kalenna had been sending some sort of nonverbal command to Parvok, who was hanging back near the door. She turned her attention back on the doctor and frowned. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

Julian furled his eyelids. "When I open my eyes, watch my pupils," he instructed wearily. "They should contract rapidly in the light, and then adjust back to a larger diameter. I need you to tell me if they do it at the same rate, and if they're of equal size when they settle."

Major Kalenna huffed in mild annoyance, but said; "Very well." Julian waited another ten seconds before forcing his eyes wide and staring into the long lighting bar above Tain's cot. The glare was momentarily unbearable, and then the room settled back into gloom.

"They are equal," said Kalenna. She turned and walked away. She gestured at Julian. "Sub-Lieuntenant."

Parvok moved in obediently, offering his arm and shoulder. Julian's pride wanted him to get to his feet unaided, but common sense prevailed. He took a firm hold on the Romulan and levered himself up.

Standing wasn't as hard as sitting up had been, though he couldn't bear to put even a third of his weight on his bad knee. Julian swayed for a moment, but found his equilibrium quickly and was able to walk to the door under his own power. He earned another subtly supercilious look from Kalenna when she stopped him at the door to thrust two canteens into his arms: the one he had been nursing for the last interminable day, and the one he had passed off to her in repayment of his debts. Julian twitched the corner of his lips, meaning to smile his thanks, and ran into the bruising around his mouth instead. He imagined he must make quite the sight.

Kalenna did not go out with them. She seemed to be dawdling deliberately, though Julian could not think why. He was in no frame of mind to be analyzing the choices of his cellmates.

In the atrium, General Martok stood leaning against one of the pylons that upheld the dome. He was staring at the lighted ring, his solitary eye boring into the dust in its centre. There was a dark blotch near one of the posts, where the Cardassian had fallen the day before. Parvok moved to hurry past, but Julian lingered, limping nearer.

"General?" he said quietly, trying to appraise the Klingon's mental state. There was a haunted cast to his carven countenance that made Julian uneasy.

Martok inhaled an involuntary snort of air, startled from his reverie. For a moment, he did not seem to recognize the person before him. Then he grimaced tightly. "Doctor," he muttered. He cast his gaze away towards the far end of the atrium. "They have left you on your feet."

"I suppose I'm fortunate," said Julian wryly.

"No." The word had a leaden finality that made Julian's innards churn. "None of us are fortunate. Deyos will have kept you whole for some purpose of his own, and you can be sure it will not be to your benefit."

Julian didn't know what to say to this. He shifted his canteens into the crook of his arm, noticing now that there were two bottles standing next to Martok's left boot. He, too, was prepared for the distribution of the daily ration.

Martok reached up suddenly and scraped the crest of Julian's brow with his thumb. The cut above his eyebrow stung as part of the new scab was scraped away by the Klingon's thick nail. Julian felt the trickle of blood, and a moment later, Martok was examining a smear across the pad of his finger. He made a small noise of satisfaction: Julian had not been replaced during his brief time in Deyos's office.

"When you interfered last night, while they had me surrounded, I thought you were a fool," Martok said. He fixed his eye on Julian again, and it was burning with some unspoken —- perhaps unspeakable — feeling. "Worse, I thought you were malicious, trying to deprive me of my chance for an honourable death. But that isn't so, is it, Starfleet officer? You are not stupid or spiteful, but blindly brave."

Julian could think of nothing to say to this. It would have been better to keep his distance. He didn't want any more of Martok's scrutiny than he had to have. But his professional instincts had gotten the better of his desire for anonymity.

"I cannot hate a man for his courage," Martok said. "Whatever he robbed me of by exercising it."

"They weren't going to kill you," Julian said. The thought was out of his mouth before he could stop it. He plowed ahead. "The First was commanding them not to. He said… he said you were worth more to them alive than dead."

"That much is true," Martok muttered grimly. "They delight to make sport of me. I am a greater challenge than the Cardassians. Or the Romulans."

He said this last word without the usual contempt Klingons displayed for their ancestral rival. Martok was not disparaging Romulans: only stating a bald truth.

"In the ring," Julian said softly, looking at it in fresh understanding.

"Aaah!" Martok nodded tightly. "I knew they would not let me be slain proudly on my feet, with a blade in my hand. I knew, and yet I hoped. When the door opened at last and I saw my chance, I struck out blindly. I hoped…"

"You didn't seem to be in your right mind," Julian ventured cautiously. "I thought maybe…" He considered his words carefully. "That maybe you weren't making calculated choices, but only reacting out of strain."

"It was like a dream," Martok agreed. "A dream of nothingness broken suddenly by chaos, and then of the whirlwind of battle. For a moment, it was a dream of freedom…"

The distant rhythm of his voice evoked the memory of Klingon music — not the proud, stentorian operas that Commander Worf loved to pipe through the comm system of the docked  _Defiant_  at tympanic membrane-rupturing volumes, but the older, wistful ballads that Jadzia favoured. Julian stared at this man, whom he had always regarded as a arrogant dogmatist and a warmonger, and he wondered.

Suddenly, Martok seized his left arm, gripping just below the shoulder and tugging Julian into a closed circle. He tensed, startled and fearful, expecting a threat and hoping that Martok did not drive home his point with his fists.

"Federation doctors!" Martok hissed, his voice so low that it was more a vibration on the air than an audible sound. "You take an oath of secrecy, to guard the words entrusted to you against all comers. Is it not so?"

"Confidentiality," Julian said, breathless with surprise. "We do. The only exceptions…" He paused, considering. "… don't apply in here," he concluded, deciding this was accurate. The authorities he answered to were on the far side of the Galaxy. He owed the Vorta no duty to report, whatever the circumstances.

"Good," said Martok. "And you consider this to extend not only to the workings of the body, but the mind also, is  _that_  not so?"

"Yes." Julian nodded despite the wave of sickening pain that rippled through his skull as he did. "A patient's thoughts and emotions are as essential to our work as a patient's vitals, and they're protected by confidentiality."

" _Good_ ," Martok repeated. "You must not speak of any of this, especially not to Tain. He must not know… information is that Cardassian's favourite tool, and he is a clever and unscrupulous craftsman."

Julian thought he understood. The General did not want Tain to suspect that he wished for death. Tain probably knew this already, since it wasn't very difficult to deduce from Martok's behaviour the night before, but the depth of the desire and the emotions embroiled with it were another matter. Julian could definitely understand Martok's wish to keep this to himself.

"I won't say a word," he promised calmly. The grip on his arm eased, and Martok gave his shoulder a single pat with a cupped palm. He looked about to speak, but at that moment the klaxon sounded, calling the prisoners to their meal.

 _(fade_ )


	9. A Tiger in the Ring

**Part II, Act IV: A Tiger in the Ring**

The mash of stewed grain and alien lentils looked even more sickening than it had the day before, but Julian had not been stupid enough to attempt to refuse his share. Even if he hadn't had Kalenna's warning about the Jem'Hadar's approach to suspected hunger strikers, he knew that he could not go on much longer without food if he intended to keep his condition from deteriorating. Still, he sat in Tain's corner of the mess area with the metal pan in his lap for a long time before he could bring himself to touch the ration.

The water, though, was another matter. He felt like a wealthy man with two full litres to his name, and although he didn't allow himself to drink too quickly, he was more profligate than he should have been. He nursed down the first few hundred millilitres before he even took his first scoop of mush.

It was as tasteless as it had been yesterday, but after a couple of effortful swallows his stomach awoke and he was suddenly ravenous. Soon he was shovelling up fingerfuls of his meal faster than was strictly prudent, sucking every morsel from his fingers as he went. Martok, who had glowered disdainfully at his plate and muttered; "Vile slop!", was doing the same. The Breen — whom Julian had today observed receiving some sort of nutrient injection through the shoulder port of their refrigeration suit — stood in vacant silence, disinterested; and the Romulans were diligently focused on their own meals. But Tain's gaze travelled idly to and fro between the human and the Klingon, amused by the desperation of their hunger.

Julian began to feel queazy when he approached the last few globs of grey grain. He had eaten less at this daily meal than he was accustomed to getting at the Replimat for lunch alone, but his stomach felt bloated and overfull. And his head was hammering mercilessly with every swallow. He had to force himself to finish the last two mouthfuls, and unlike Martok, he did not lick his plate.

Tain laid aside his dish and looked imperiously at Parvok, who scrambled up and then helped the aged Cardassian to his feet. Then the Sub-Lieutenant gathered the plates and joined the line of prisoners turning them in. Kalenna got onto one knee and slid across to Julian's side, sombre and purposeful. He understood, and shifted his body in an attempt to make the transition easier. His pains had settled deeply now, particularly in his ribs and the inflamed knee that he was beginning to expect to start straining the fabric of his uniform trouser. He felt badly about relying on Kalenna, who was considerably shorter than he was and slightly built beneath her quilted tunic, but he knew he'd never be able to stand unaided — certainly not quick enough to please the Jem'Hadar, who were already haranguing the prisoners to clear the mess area.

A shadow fell over him as he hitched himself up against the wall, pushing with his good leg while the hyperextended one trailed. General Martok loomed above him, his stern and weathered face impassive.

"Stand aside, Major," he rumbled, nodding curt dismissal at Kalenna. She shifted back onto her heels and stood, keeping her eyes on the General as she went.

Julian held out his hands, expecting to be taken by the wrists and counterbalanced. Instead, Martok leaned in and hooked a strong hand under each of his arms. With a low grunt of effort, more satisfied than strained, the Klingon rocked back on his off leg and, with only the most cursory support from Julian's good leg, hoisted the full-grown human man to his feet as if he were a child being lifted out of a paddling pool.

Julian's right leg slid after him, without any undue strain or aggravation of the outraged joint. His side ached sharply, bruised ribs strained. But the motion had been so swift and smooth that even his head only flared a little in protest.

"Thank you," he puffed, left a little breathless by the ease of the Klingon's lift.

Martok nodded dismissively, to show this was nothing to him. "I may not be of any help tomorrow," he muttered, his deep voice very low. "But for now… it is what I have to offer."

He picked up his canteens and stumped off, and Julian thought he held his head a little higher than before. It might have been his imagination. Or his vision was swimming again.

Kalenna slid in beside him, his bottles in hand. When Julian had them settled in the crook of his right elbow, where the chill of the metal seeped through his uniform to soothe his ribs, the Romulan offered her arm and her shoulder on his left. Julian accepted gratefully, glad of the counterbalance as he tried to keep his weight off of his bad leg. Even so, the exertion elevated his clinically perfect blood pressure enough to set his head throbbing, and they were not halfway across the atrium when he had to stop. He doubled over, gripping his thigh for balance, and fought the urge to retch up his meal onto the seamless floor.

"If you are going to vomit, you cannot do it here," Kalenna warned. She was standing over him, watchful as a falcon, as the other prisoners ebbed around them and the Jem'Hadar prowled to their afternoon posts.

Inanely, Julian wondered what anyone could do to prevent him, if his body decided that was what was going to happen. The jaded voice in the back of his mind supplied several suggestions: drag him off to solitary, vaporize him with a plasma-blast, dislocate his jaw with a flick of the thumbs. It didn't matter. He had no intention whatsoever of vomiting, here or anywhere else. He had no particular attachment to the meal he had just eaten, but the water was something else entirely. It was going to stay where it was, and his deprived body was going to absorb it and put it to work, and there was an end to it.

It worked. Whether because he had more control over his body's involuntary functions than most, or because of sheer strength of will, or because both his throbbing brain and his churning stomach knew that the precious fluid could not be wasted, Julian overcame the urge and choked back the rising lump of chime that burned behind his sternum. The effort left him slick with sweat and quaking, but he straightened at last and let Kalenna help him back to the relative shelter of Barracks 6.

General Martok had taken command of the rear of the room. He had his legs planted broadly in a shallow battle crouch, and his arms were in motion, one outstretched before him and the other drawn up near his blind-side ear. Julian let Kalenna help him to ease down onto the first bench, transfixed by Martok's slow and meticulously controlled motion. He recognized the form and quality of the movement: it was the warm-up routine of the same form of Klingon martial arts practiced by both Jadzia Dax and Commander Worf back on the station. Worf even ran a morning exercise class in one of the holosuites — Quark cut him a deal for the low-demand time slot, but Julian suspected Jadzia had been the one to broker it.

Julian was familiar with the regimen, having attended a few classes himself so that he could get a feeling for the level of fitness required of participants and the range of motion involved. He'd recommended it to quite a few patients. Unlike Klingon combat, which was fearsome and often frenzied, this was a deliberate and contemplative system of movement, purposeful and controlled but unmistakably serene. When teaching, Worf always wore loose-fitting garments of soft cotton, emphasizing his authority as a fitness instructor in a very Starfleet manner. Watching General Martok execute the same routines in full armour was a very different experience. Julian was transfixed.

Martok executed a rapid exchange, swapping front foot for back before sweeping down into another meticulously controlled lunge. This time, however, his face furrowed with pain and his stance wobbled. He bared his teeth, compensating, and continued to press on into the movement.

"Careful," Julian advised, carried away by his clinical interest in the motion and forgetting that his input was completely unsolicited. "It looks like you've got some kind of entrapment in your left hip. Maybe a nerve, maybe a tendon. It's restricting your range of motion. I noticed the same thing last night. If you like—"

Martok's good eye lolled in his direction, smouldering with an irascible demand for silence. Julian closed his mouth and held up an apologetic palm to pledge his cooperation. He castigated himself, irritated. It was getting harder to remember that this man was dangerous, and known throughout the Alpha Quadrant for his hatred of Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. That his earlier words and his actions towards Julian did not quite mesh with this reputation was strange, but not a good reason to be reckless.

At last the Klingon was through with his regimen. He snapped out of the last pose like a gymnast dismounting the high bars — a surreal but apt comparison. He was breathing heavily, and he stumped to the unclaimed cot to blot at his brow with the coarse blanket. Then he sat heavily next to Julian on the table.

"It is good to spread my limbs again," Martok said with grim relish. "To feel the blood run strong in my veins. It is almost enough to give a man hope."

He spoke as if his ordeal in solitary confinement had been a matter of weeks, or months, rather than two days. Julian supposed that to a Klingon, born to freedom and the warrior's ways, it had felt like an eternity.

"I could examine your hip, if you like," he offered quietly, knowing nothing else to say.

Martok clapped him on the shoulder. Julian tensed, his wariness resurfacing. The hand cupped the joint, but not tightly. Martok rocked him twice, bracingly.

"Not now, Doctor," he said. "The threshold of battle is no place for prodding and coddling."

He sounded eager to face the Jem'Hadar. Weary, but eager. Julian remembered how he had whirled like a caged beast, surefooted and swift even in his insensible state. But in his battered state, with only one eye, he was surely no match for one of the lethal soldiers of the Dominion.

Julian knew that particular protestation would not be welcome. He watched wordlessly as Martok took a deep swig from one of his bottles, and wiped his scarred lips with the back of one hand. He examined his bracers critically, and then snugged up his belt. He growled under his breath as he glared at the door.

"Where are they?" he murmured. "Where are they?"

Kalenna, sitting on her cot with her legs crossed in the middle of the flat pallet, drew her lips into a thin line of disapproval. If the Klingon's eagerness gave Julian pause, it mystified her. Julian wondered if she had seen any of her compatriots in the ring, beaten down like the hapless Cardassian.  _Why do you think there are so few of my people left?_ Parvok had asked. Romulans might share the Vulcan stamina in a fight, but they lacked the advantages of skeletal structure and muscle mass that evolution had afforded the Klingons. And Julian suspected they had been nurtured without the thirst for battle.

At last, the door shrieked open and Ikat'ika came in. Armed guards, rifles at the ready, flanked him. They looked like they had come to fetch a prisoner for execution, not sport.

"It is time, Klingon," said the First.

Martok rose to his feet, a sound like the warning warble in a tiger's throat rising with him. He bared his sharp front teeth and squared his shoulders. "Lead the way!" he declaimed. "The darkness has whet the blade of my resolve. It is a good day to die!"

First Ikat'ika did not mock him as Deyos had done. He only looked Martok over once, coldly appraising, and then jerked his head in a single nod of assent. He stepped crisply aside, and Martok strode between the two armed sentries. Ikat'ika followed, and the others closed ranks behind.

Julian got awkwardly to his feet, and was surprised to see, once he was upright and once again able to focus on anything other than the effort of standing, that Kalenna had done the same. Expecting her to stop him as she had the previous afternoon, he warned, "I'm going out. He may need help when they've finished."

To his surprise, the Major nodded tightly. "He always does," she said. She cast a communicative look at Parvok, who was sitting on the floor near the head of Tain's empty cot. He nodded almost imperceptibly. Kalenna looked back at the human. "Do you need assistance?"

"Better not, this time," he said, hoping he was right about his ability to propel himself under his own power. "I thought the Jem'Hadar preyed on weakness."

There was an unmistakable glint of respect in her frosty eyes. "They do," she said.

She let him lead the way,  _lieutenant_  or not, Starfleet idealist or not. Parvok and the silent Breen watched them go.

_(fade_ )

It seemed to Julian that every Jem'Hadar in the prison was gathered around the ring. A quick sweep of his eyes toted up the census without the bother of a conscious count: twenty-six. That couldn't be all of them, then, surely. The  _Defiant_ 's experiences with the Dominion's shock troops suggested that unit populations in multiples of ten were standard. Two to guard the force-field outside the Vorta's office, but where were the other two? Or were there another ten beyond that, hidden away somewhere? He would have to ask the others. Tain, at least, would have made it his business to know the enemy's numbers.

Even if there were forty, the prisoners had them outnumbered five to one. But the only prisoners in sight now were the three of them: a human male and a Romulan woman, hanging back in the shadow of the nearest pillar, and the Klingon, now standing erect just inside the lighted ring.

Ikat'ika circled the outer edge of the arena, addressing his men. "Observe how the Klingon thirsts again for battle," he announced sternly. "Injury… does not deter him. Blindness… does not stop him. Punishment… only heightens his desire for combat."

_Blindness does not stop him_. Julian felt ill. He had already deduced that the General had lost his eye in the camp, but somehow this cavalier assessment of the mutilation brought the horror of that home in some new and awful way.

Martok was silently seething, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.  _Enough talk_ , that stance said.  _Come for me if you dare_!

"His injuries are now stabilized, and he has had two days of enforced rest," Ikat'ika said. "He will prove a greater challenge today than he has in many weeks. But who among you is worthy to be the first to break him in?"

There were low, boastful murmurs. One soldier, with the craggy visage and deep scale-fissures of a veteran, stepped forward.

"I am worthy, First. I will break the Klingon," he decreed.

"No, Second," said Ikat'ika solemnly. "It is not your turn today. Fourth Tiratak'nar, step forward!"

The Jem'Hadar who had squared off with Martok over the kar'takin the night before moved forward out of the crowd. He had the wide-set, sidling stance of his species, and his granite eyes glinted.

"First!" he said crisply, looking for an eerie moment not unlike an eager cadet reporting for his first duty assignment. Julian shook off that thought. It was chilling.

"You followed my orders last night," Ikat'ika announced. "It is one thing to cut down an enemy. It is another thing, a harder thing, to withhold death when your hearth thunders with the heat of combat. For your restraint and your obedience, you shall be rewarded. Obedience brings victory!"

"And victory is life!" the Fourth recited ferociously.

"You restrained yourself yesterday," said the First. "You need not restrain yourself today. Face him, if you will. Defeat him, if you can. Begin!"

Ikat'ika stepped back from the ring, arms crossed. Tiratak'nar sprang over the lighted lip, landing catlike with his arms upraised in battle-readiness. Martok was already shifting from left to right, ready to fight. He side-stepped and slapped one of the posts with his fist. The gong sounded. On the other side of the ring, the Jem'Hadar did the same.

What Julian had witnessed yesterday had been little better than a mugging. This was battle. Martok was not as limber on his feet as the Jem'Hadar, hampered by whatever was amiss with his hip and a subtle sluggishness that almost looked like exhaustion. But as soon as the Fourth lunged for him, Martok's hands whipped out, grappling expertly. The Jem'Hadar was thrown to the side, stumbling but not quite falling. He circled again, and Martok slammed the heel of his hand into the spines of the reptilian jaw. They circled again, and locked arms briefly. The Jem'Hadar landed a blow this time, glancing off of Martok's armour.

The grim eagerness in the Klingon's solitary eye burned brightly. The Jem'Hadar's face was taut with readiness and a hunger for fulfilment of last night's lost promise. They circled again, and came to blows. Martok swung a sweeping foot, tripping the Jem'Hadar again. Again, the Fourth kept his feet, but less nimbly this time.

"He's good," Julian murmured to Kalenna as Martok dealt a ferocious blow that caught the Jem'Hadar just below the ribs and sent him crashing to the ground at last. The word was woefully inadequate, but no better superlative rose to mind. "He's going to  _win_."

"Do not be so sure," said Kalenna. "His stamina is not what it was a year ago. And he is vulnerable on the left."

As if Tiratak'nar had heard her, he feinted right and, when Martok followed the motion, swung in from his blind side and blasted his fist into the Klingon's jaw. A spray of spittle and blood hung briefly in the air, and Martok crashed onto his right hip and elbow. His legs scissored against the floor, generating the momentum he needed to bolt to his feet. He staggered for the nearest post. The gong rang again.

It went on for longer than Julian would have expected. Each time one opponent landed a blow, the other rebounded a little more slowly. Any kind of regulated contest of strength and stamina would have surely overrun the clock by now, and Julian was beginning to become aware of just how long he had been standing. He put the discomfort from his mind, telling himself he had no business complaining. He wasn't the one in the arena, after all, taking and meting out blow after blow.

It was an unfair match, and the longer it dragged on, the more obvious it became. The Jem'Hadar were a short-lived species — matured from a zygote to an adult in under a month, considered honoured Elders by the age of fifteen. This one was probably a quarter of General Martok's age. The missing eye and the impinged femur were only part of the problem. He was haggard and battered, malnourished and worn down by who knew how many matches in this glowing circle of bloodlust. How many times had he been thrown down upon this hard stone floor? Kicked by the steel boots of his opponents? Beaten into submission because a Klingon warrior would never surrender?

Julian watched, dismayed, as the Fourth sent Martok to the ground with one of the two-fisted hammer blows that had been the Cardassian's undoing. He was no less horrified by the sight of Martok dragging himself on hands and knees to the nearest post, and slamming both palms down upon it as he hauled his body upright again. The gong sounded. The match continued.

When the tide turned, it did so suddenly. Martok evaded a blow that would have struck home with targeted precision twenty minutes earlier, when Tiratak'nar was fresh. In the momentary advantage that followed his opponent's confusion, the Klingon got a grip on the Fourth's belt. He yanked and twisted, wrenching the guard off-balance while his right fist swung and connected just behind the Jem'Hadar's temporal crest. There was a resounding  _crack_  of bone-on-bone, and Tiratak'nar reeled. Up came Martok's knee, down came both fists, this time on the Fourth's shoulder. When he hit the ground this time, he flailed and struggled, but could not rise.

Martok retreated to the far side of the ring, prowling at the ready. His chest was heaving and his breath came in short, sharp pants, but he was still on his feet and the Jem'Hadar was not. Finally, Ikat'ika raised a hand.

"Victory to the Klingon," he announced. His voice was no less stentorian now than it had been when he'd announced his own man's triumph yesterday. "Fourth Tiratak'nar is defeated in combat."

Two of the Jem'Hadar hurried into the ring, picking up their superior by his armpits and dragging him off. They hauled him clear of the crowd and left him there, lying in a heap at the base of the wall. They returned to join the others.

In any other situation, Julian would have gone for the unconscious man first. The Fourth was still breathing, albeit laboriously: Martok's final blows had not been lethal. But the defeated was a guard, and the victor was a prisoner, and Julian did not need the cynicism of Tain or the mordant realism of Parvok to know where his loyalties lay in this situation.

Martok had sunk to his knees in the ring, shoulders slumped and head hanging. His curled hands lay palm-up on each knee, and his back hitched and heaved as he tried to catch his breath. Julian jolted forward, rocking inelegantly as he nudged between two Jem'Hadar who were too flabbergasted to stop him. Somewhere behind him, he heard Kalenna's strangled noise of protest. He had to hop over the lip of the ring, bracing himself against one of the posts for balance. The gong sounded, regrettably drawing the eyes of every Jem'Hadar in the atrium.

He couldn't crouch by the General, so he bent forward awkwardly, planting both palms before lowering himself onto his good knee. It was a single, smooth motion, but he knew it must look perfectly ridiculous. Julian supposed it didn't matter. Just who was he trying to impress with his agile athleticism, anyway? He adjusted the angle of his bad leg, almost straight and jutting off to the side just like last time, and then leaned in to assess his patient.

He planted one hand on Martok's sloped and craggy brow, feeling the clammy slickness of the skin. His other hand found the General's pulse, pounding in his carotid like the flow of some tidal river. Martok stiffened under Julian's touch, but did not lift his head. He was fighting to catch his breath, and the doctor's ministrations were nothing but the buzzing of carrion flies on the borders of that battle.

The hairs at the nape of Julian's neck prickled, and a shadow fell across Martok's knee. A quick upward glance told Julian what he'd feared: First Ikat'ika was in the ring. His first instinct was obdurate irritation, and then he was taken by a sundering fear that swept the bottom out of his abdomen so that all his internal organs seemed to plunge down half a metre. He heard Deyos's frigid whisper in his ear:  _the next 'patient' you try to spare from their punishment will be vaporized with a plasma rifle. Do I make myself clear?_

But he wasn't interfering with a punishment, was he? The fight was over. Martok had won. Surely, surely they were not going to shoot him because of Julian's interference…

"Five minutes," said the Jem'Hadar First, no inflection at all in his voice. "Then we begin again."

Terror dissolved into indignation. Julian twisted, hands still on his patient. He glared up at the First. "Again?" he parroted. "He won the match! You've had your fun for today. Leave us alone."

"If the prisoner loses, the combat is finished," said Ikat'ika. He sounded almost perplexed, as if he did not understand how anyone could be confused by this. "If the prisoner wins, we fight again."

_Like the schoolyard ringleader_ , Julian thought bitterly;  _explaining the rules of the game to the only child too slow to remember them from one day to the next_.

"That's a barbaric double standard," he sniped, heaping all the scorn he could into his words. "I don't approve of this man fighting another match today."

Ikat'ika swooped down, bracing a palm on each knee and leaning in to stare Julian squarely in the eyes. The gill-like flaps on either side of his neck flared and rippled with the force of his disapproval.

"And who are you," he enunciated slowly; "to give or withhold your  _approval_  of our ways? The Vorta is right about you, human.  _You do not know your place_."

Julian was lost in another one of those shocked, icy moments when the world around him suddenly made no more sense than a string of random numbers. He knew, intellectually, that he had no authority here, no power at all. And yet some part of him, still thinking like a Chief Medical Officer, had earnestly believed that all he had to do was render his medical opinion about the General's fitness to perform, and he would be excused from the obligation until his condition improved. He had genuinely expected, at least in the moment he spoke, for his judgment to be respected and his patient's rights observed.

He saw the absurdity of the assumption. He truly did. But he had made it anyway, and now he didn't know how to gather his wits again. He stared at Ikat'ika, adrift in a maelstrom of helpless confusion. He could see every crevice and pore on the First's thorny cheeks. He could feel the hot breath buffeting against his bruised face. He could smell the faint, sickly chalkiness of the Ketracel White port in the Jem'Hadar's neck, and hear the faint whisper of the drug as it sped upward in its continuous stream. He could taste the copper afterglow of concussion on his tongue. Every sense was alive and as acute as ever, and yet his reasoning centres were paralyzed.

After what seemed an eternity in purgatory, Ikat'ika spoke again.

"If the Klingon yields," he said ponderously; "he may return to the barracks to fight another day."

_Well, then, he yields_! Julian thought emphatically, but he could not say the words. In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Jadzia, standing gracefully contrapposto with her arms crossed in disapproval. She shook her head slowly, one eyebrow arched.

"I do not yield!" Martok growled. "Five minutes, Ikat'ika, and then send me your best!"

"Five minutes," Julian said, his mouth filled with dust and his vision blurred as he dropped his gaze to Martok's hands. He could see smears of red even through the fog: the Klingon's knuckles were bleeding. Even now, when it was hopeless, he could not keep from advocating for his patient. "But they start now."

"Very well," spat the First, more disdainful than accommodating: a small delay was immaterial to him, and no ground had truly been given. "Be sure that you are out of the ring in time, human."

Julian's whole body began to shudder as the Jem'Hadar stalked off, but he turned Martok's hand with both his own and began to palpate the metacarpals, checking for fractures. Shock or no shock, he had to work fast.

_(fade)_


	10. An Obvious Truth

_Note: Don't try this at home. And credit where credit is due, I borrowed the phrase "exhausted beyond comprehension" from the stage directions in the script for "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" (DS9, Episode 7.16). Some of Ronald D. Moore's best writing is never heard on-screen._

**Part II, Act V: An Obvious Truth**

In the end, it was not broken ribs or a blow to the head that felled General Martok in the ring. By the beginning of his third match, Fourth Tiratak'nar had regained consciousness and his feet, but the twice-victorious Klingon was tiring rapidly. The hulking Jem'Hadar he had been set to fight this time got a grip on Martok's outstretched forearm and threw him savagely to the floor. Julian's mind had a brief moment to observe the various forces in play and extrapolate the physics of the motion, and he saw the inevitable result before it happened, but the sickening  _pop_  still caught him off-guard. He cringed in sympathetic shock as the Klingon warrior let out a bellow of savage outrage.

He was flat on his back, clutching his left wrist and rocking on his shoulder blades as he tried to push himself up with his feet. It was a disconnected, chaotic series of movements, and despite Martok's valiant struggle to rise, Julian was reminded of a turtle upturned on its shell. He drove that image from his mind and hastened lopsidedly to the edge of the ring. It took an act of maddening willpower not to go right to Martok's side, but the Vorta's threat was fresh in his mind. He waited until the First declared victory for the preening Jem'Hadar who had felled an exhausted man, and then hitched himself over the lip of the arena.

Martok was still writhing, his teeth bared in pain and frustration. As Julian bowed inelegantly over him, getting as low as he could before the pain in his knee started impinging on his ability to focus and then bending the rest of the way from the waist, the warrior snarled and tried to roll onto his side. The motion jarred his injured arm and he hissed through clenched teeth, but it was clear that he had no intention of crying out again.

"Try to hold still," Julian instructed, firmly but quietly. He wasn't anxious to broadcast his patient's condition to the lingering Jem'Hadar, but that wasn't the only reason to lower his voice. He wanted the Klingon to be forced to listen if he wanted to hear the words: to compel him to focus on something other than his agony — or his defeat. "You've dislocated your elbow. Don't pull on your wrist."

Martok let out a hot hiss of breath, his head whipping away from Julian and then back again. His eye, burning with animal anguish, fixed on the doctor's face.

"How can you know that? You haven't even touched me!" Martok challenged.

 _How, indeed_. The defect wasn't visible under the heavy sleeve of the Klingon battle uniform, and doctors weren't supposed to be able to diagnose injuries on the strength of Newtonian physics alone. Julian  _could_  explain the principles of differential diagnosis and the most probably pattern of injury from any given trauma, or how the fact that he'd heard a  _pop_  rather than a  _crack_  meant the arm wasn't broken, but what good would that do?

"Never mind that," he said, taking a steady grip on Martok's left bracer. He had to bend further forward to do it, and his temple began to thunder ominously. The Klingon's fist abandoned his hold on that wrist, and closed on Julian's arm instead, threatening to fling him off. " _Trust_  me."

As soon as the words left his lips, he heard how absurd they sounded. The man who had vowed to avenge betrayal of the Detapa Council extraction upon the whole of the Federation, instructed to trust a Starfleet doctor while he rocked in pain. But Martok's hold on his arm loosened, and he was able to ease the Klingon's wrist up towards his breastbone. This widened the gap in the dislocated joint, so that bone no longer ground excruciatingly on bone. Julian flattened his palm over Martok's hand, pressing it in place as visible relief rippled across the warrior's face.

"Hold it there instead," Julian said. "We need to get you back to the barracks so I can pop the elbow back into place."

It wasn't just a matter of doing this out of sight of the Jem'Hadar. If Julian was going to reduce the deformity on his own, without the capable assistance of Nurse Jabara or one of the other members of the highly-trained staff he relied upon on Deep Space Nine, he needed a table. He looked frantically back over his shoulder, hoping that Major Kalenna was still standing in the shadow of the pylon.

She wasn't: she was already climbing into the ring.

"We need to get him up. Help me," Julian said.

Martok shifted as if to push himself up onto his good elbow. Julian stayed his hand before it could shift. "Support your arm," he admonished firmly. "We'll help you sit up."

It wasn't easy. Martok was a large man, and though the dispiriting prison fare had left him lean and sinewy, his body was still heavy with densely-packed muscle. Kalenna was small, Julian couldn't anchor himself for proper leverage, and several of the Jem'Hadar were still watching. But with a concerted effort and some painful exertions on all their parts, Martok was sitting up, bowed forward over his lap and still clutching his injured arm as his physician had instructed. From there, he was able to do most of the work of clambering to his feet, though he uttered a few very choice oaths as he rose.

Kalenna guided the fallen warrior back to Barracks 6, and Julian thought it was a mark of how much pain the General was in that he let her do it. Limping behind, trying to stay simultaneously out of the way of the Major and in control of his patient, Julian slid past the unlikely pair — Klingon and Romulan, fleet commander and spy — at the barracks door. He hurriedly swept the blanket and bottles from the first of the benches.

"How bad is it this time?" a conversational voice asked, curious but ultimately indifferent to the answer. Julian glanced at Enabran Tain, who had disappeared during the breakup of the mealtime assembly and was (apparently) back again for no discernible reason.

"It is nothing," growled Martok.

"It's not  _nothing_ ," Julian corrected irascibly. His head was throbbing and his knee pulsed hotly, but there was no time to waste worrying about his own discomforts now. The longer he waited to reduce the dislocation, the more inflammation and muscle spasm he would have to cope with. He had no anesthetics or antispasmotics or anxiolytics or even analgesics: nothing to make this process easier for either patient or doctor. All he had on his side was proximity to the time of injury, and that was slipping away by the second.

"I'm going to need you lying face down on the bench," he instructed. "And I'll need access to the elbow. Is there any way to get you out of that tunic without removing the chainmail?"

Martok growled, rolling his good shoulder to shake off Kalenna's guarding hand. He stalked away from her, prowling to the back of the barracks. "I do not need to lie down. It is nothing. Put it back into place, and be done!"

Julian restrained an exasperated roll of the eyes. He was cross and sore and exhausted, but he didn't intend to let any of that overcome his professionalism. He had treated Commander Worf often enough to know that Klingons made challenging patients. Pride was part of it. So was stubbornness. But frankly, he thought the truth was that they simply were not comfortable with doctors.

Having an audience didn't help. Julian looked around at the others. Two Romulans, one of whom was gawking noticeably. The General had let Major Kalenna support him on the painful walk back to the barracks, but that didn't mean he wanted her to witness the setting of his arm. The Breen's blank-visored stare was unnerving at the best of times. And there was Tain, who seemed to be taking in the whole spectacle as if he were in a corner box at the theatre.

"Everyone out!" Julian decided briskly. "Go and take a walk. Do a sweep of the perimeter. Just leave the room."

Parvok didn't need to be told twice. He was out the door almost before Julian finished speaking. Kalenna looked less certain. "If you need assistance…" she began.

"I won't need assistance if the General cooperates," said Julian resolutely. He glared at Tain. "You need to go as well."

The Cardassian looked affronted. "I don't let anyone tell me when to go or when to stay in my own home, Doctor," he said, blustering with false injury.

Julian cast a wide, sarcastic look around the room. "This is home?" he challenged. "How the mighty have fallen, Tain."

"How indeed, Doctor. How indeed," Tain lamented, nodding sombrely. But his eyes glittered gleefully at the riposte, and he meandered for the door at last. As it slammed closed behind him, Julian turned his attention back on Martok.

"It's just you and I, General," he said. Belatedly he added, glancing at the middle cot on the righthand wall; "And the Breen."

"The Breen," muttered Martok. "I do not trust a people who fear to show their faces."

"I can't ask them to leave: I'm not even sure they can understand what we're saying," said Julian. "As far as I know, Starfleet translators aren't able to parse the Breen language."

Martok made a grumbling sound, but he returned to the bench. He was moving more stiffly now, shuffling instead of striding. The pain was telling in his movements, and upon his face. "Is this really necessary, Doctor?" he groused.

"I'm afraid so," Julian said with an exaggerated sigh. Klingons tended to respond well to dramatics, in his opinion. "But the longer we wait, the more unpleasant it's going to be for both of us."

Martok sat down on the edge of the bench, pushing up with the toe of his boot until he was positioned to lie back. Julian wasn't quite sure how to break the news that he needed to be in a prone position, but before they got to that, he had to deal with the sleeve.

"I'm going to unbuckle your bracer," he said, taking an awkward shuffle-step around the corner of the table. He planted his left foot firmly and tucked the right up behind, so that the weight of his calf could traction his knee a little. The pulsing misery in the joint let up slightly but measurably, freeing more of his mind to focus on his patient.

Martok bared his teeth in anticipation of the pain as Julian brushed away his good hand and took control of the injured limb. Klingons apparently favoured simplicity over inscrutability when it came to the design of their garment fastenings: he released five small hooks, and was able to slide the truncated cone off of the forearm. He opened the cuff of Martok's sleeve and slid his hand inside, but there was not enough room to manoeuvre.

At home, in his well-appointed infirmary, Julian would have simply cut the sleeve off in order to access the injury. Here, not only was he without a laser or even a pair of scissors ("Low-tech, but effective, Mister Bashir!", as his Heritage Techniques in Manual Surgery professor had loved to say.), but he had no means of repairing — much less replacing — the garment when he was done. If there was any way to spare Martok's tunic, Julian had to try.

He returned control of the arm to his patient, and reached to unfasten Martok's belt. If he could ease off the heavily padded vest that supported the winged shoulder plates and the interlocking spine ornamentation, maybe he'd be able to see a solution. The Klingon, however, shifted his hip and pulled back from Julian's hands.

"I just want—" Julian began apologetically. He always tried to make a point of explaining himself to patients before he touched them in unanticipated ways, but he'd forgotten. It made him feel guilty and less-than-competent — not a good frame of mind going into any procedure.

"It unlaces at the shoulder," Martok muttered tightly. "I am hardly the first warrior since the days of Kahless to need an arm set while in armour."

"Oh!" Julian didn't have the time or the energy for chagrin. He reached up into the shadow of the left shoulder-plate and felt around. Sure enough, the top of the sleeve was laced to the edge of the armhole with a single flat cord, wrapped in a tight spiral through a series of eyes. He found the knot near the back, and his fingers worked nimbly to separate the two pieces.

Easing the sleeve down over the elbow was delicate work, and twice Martok growled ominously against the urge to cry out in pain. But soon the voluminous black tube was lying on the floor, and Martok's arm was encased only in the snugly-fitted sheath of his undershirt. It looked like it had once been off-white, but it was stained with blood and grime. It felt oily to the touch, and gave off a pungent stink of dead skin and Klingon body odour. But it clung tightly to the arm, and Julian was able to appreciate the dislocation visually at last.

It was a nasty one, the joint fully separated. The humerus seemed to be coming out of the forearm much further down than usual, with the crest of the ulna sticking out like a nob behind. Deciding to leave well enough alone and to work around the remaining sleeve, Julian fixed his resolve and flexed his fingers.

"I need to examine your hand," he said before reaching to take it. He had to ease the forearm down a little out of the guarded pose in which Martok had been holding it. The Klingon's mouth tightened, but he made no sound. Swiftly, Julian checked the resistance in the fingers, and pinched the tips to watch the capillary refill. The palm felt unremarkably warm to the touch, but something about that niggled on the back of his mind.

"Could you touch my wrist with your other hand, please?" he asked. It felt good to hear his capable, professional voice again, and he kept his eyes on what he was doing as he palpated the carpals and felt for any unusual give or resistance.

"Your wrist?" Martok huffed. He was very deliberately looking away, as if the ceiling might fall if he did not glare at it with sufficient ferocity.

"Just touch it, just for a moment," said Julian, still focused.

The Klingon eyed him quizzically, but obeyed. He landed on the border of Julian's cuff, but even through the sleeve of his uniform, the doctor could feel the radiating heat from his patient's fingers. His lips twitched in a tiny moment of academic satisfaction. He'd suspected as much: what would be considered a normally warm hand for a human was a cold hand for a Klingon.

"All right," he said calmly. "We need to fix this right now. You're not getting proper blood flow to your hand. Turn over and lie down on your stomach. I've got your arm."

Rolling over and easing himself down was an ordeal for Martok, but he did so without complaint — almost without a sound, except for the ragged hitches of breath deep in his rumbling throat. It might have been easier on him if they'd been able to do this over the back of a chair, but if any such furniture existed in this prison at all, Julian hadn't seen it. He drove back the list of everything it would have been nice to have, and forced himself to accept the task at hand. When the time came for him to lift the arm away from Martok's chest, guiding the humerus with one hand and supporting the forearm with the other, the Klingon stiffened against the pain, but he did not cry out.

"Good," Julian soothed, kneading Martok's shoulder in a gesture intended to comfort under the guise of coaxing the muscles to relax as much as they were able. "Can you get a little more to your right, so that your shoulder's off the edge of the table on that side? I need more support over here."

Martok obeyed. Though broader than a bench, the table was narrow by biobed standards. A third of the Klingon's chest hung out over open air on the right by the time Julian had enough of the humerus anchored on the left. The General was rigid with the effort of keeping his balance.

"Put your arm underneath, around the corner," said Julian. "If you hold onto the edge, it'll help you anchor yourself."

Martok obeyed, hugging the tabletop tightly to himself. He planted his left cheek on the unyielding surface, turned resolutely away from the disjointed limb.

Finally, Julian was able to consider his own position in relation to his patient. He shuffled up a little, considered, and then took ahold of his trouser leg and hauled his right calf up onto the table. His knee protested fiercely, but he shifted his weight so that he was bracing his shin against the lip of the bench, instead of kneeling directly on the knee. As stable as he was going to get, he leaned forward over Martok and closed his right hand around the Klingon's bicep.

Julian eased more of his weight onto his arm, slowly increasing the pressure on Martok's humerus beneath. He reached down with his left hand, getting a good grip on the Klingon's forearm. He rotated it gently, rocking the joint and correcting the lateral drift of the ulna. He didn't watch his hands, staring vacantly at the door instead and letting a visualization of the anatomy involved float dreamily in his mind's eye. Overthinking a reduction was a sure way to make it as clunky (and therefore as painful) as possible.

"I've been meaning to ask someone, and I think you're the right person," he said conversationally. He could feel now that none of the bones were fractured, which confirmed what he had heard when the injury occurred. "How many Jem'Hadar are stationed here?"

"Thirty," huffed Martok. "Including the First. And there is the Vorta, of course."

"Really?" asked Julian. He could feel the coronoid process grinding against the base of the humerus. It appeared to be a little more distal in Klingons than in humans: interesting. "I counted twenty-six."

"There are thirty," Martok said resolutely. Julian recognized that tone of voice: it was the same one that Commander Worf used when delivering a tactical briefing. The General was warming into his lecture, and he had forgotten all about his arm. Perfect. "Among the Jem'Hadar, unit strengths are typically in factors of three. This is because—"

Briskly, fluidly, and with an economy of motion that had made him the star of his orthopedics practicum, Julian unlocked the coronid process with a thrust of his right arm as he dug his left thumb against the posterior aspect of the olecranon. There was an appreciable  _clunk,_  a perfect bookend to the maddening  _pop_  he had heard in the ring, and Julian's lips parted in a sudden grin as he let out a triumphant puff of air.

Martok roared, caught mid-sentence by the unexpected sensation, and he bucked instinctively against the table. But he settled almost immediately, moving his left arm gingerly up the edge of the table. Julian patted him on the shoulder-blade in companionable congratulation, remembering a little too late that a Klingon might not take kindly to such a gesture.

"Finished," he pronounced. "You can sit up now."

Martok shifted awkwardly, hampered by his unwieldy garments and the need to lift himself one-handed. Julian supported the freshly-set arm as the Klingon rocked up onto one hip and got his booted feet over the side of the table. He guided the wrist inward, satisfied by the smooth rotation of the elbow as he did so. Martok did not cup the arm with his other as most patients would have done. He seemed satisfied to rest it against his chest as he braced himself on his thigh.

Julian bent forward, reflexively rubbing his knee. He was aching to sit down, but he wanted to finish his post-procedural exam first.

Martok was watching him, taken aback. As Julian shifted awkwardly, meaning to apologize for his momentary distraction, the Klingon chuckled.

"Look at us: what a pair!" he rumbled ruefully. "Only five good limbs between the two of us. Fear not, Doctor! What we lack in stoutness of body, we make up in spirit!"

He reached out with his uninjured hand to clap the human on the shoulder. Reflexively, Julian shied away. His professional competence was fading with the afterglow of his success, and the anxious part of his mind was once again aware of just who was sitting before him.

General Martok leaned in and frowned up at him with one piercing eye, puzzled.

"Why do you fear me, Doctor?" he asked, his hoarse voice low and wondering. "You do not fear the Jem'Hadar, and yet you flinch from me."

"I don't fear you," Julian argued. The lie felt sour on his lips. "I don't know if I need to fear you," he amended. "Back home, we'd be enemies. Here…" He looked around the barren barracks, stripped of all but the starkest necessities. "If we don't do what we can for each other, we won't survive."

Martok shook his head slowly from side to side. "Enemies?" he echoed. "For eighty years, the Khitomer Accords have ensured peace between our two peoples. I do not count you an enemy, Doctor. Not for staying the hands of the Jem'Hadar, nor for your… interference this afternoon." He grinned briefly down at his hand as he waggled freshly functional fingers. "Quite the opposite."

"Seventy-eight years," Julian muttered sickly, missing the compliment entirely. His mind's eye was eclipsed by the memory of Jadzia, pacing from one end of her quarters to the other, gesticulating wildly as she soliloquized, her hurt and anger detonated by what he'd thought a harmless question. She had taken the collapse of the treaties as a personal affront, and rightly so. Her former self, Curzon Dax, had brokered the negotiations on the Federation's behalf in a tremendous diplomatic effort and, as it had turned out in the end, at a great personal cost.

Martok glowered at him, and slowly it dawned on Julian that the expression on the warrior's face was one of incomprehension.

"What do you mean?" Martok demanded. "It is eighty years. Eighty of your Federation years this spring. Time passes slowly in this place, but not as slowly as that."

Even Julian's good knee felt rubbery. He took a hopping backward step away from Martok and eased himself down onto the nearest cot. Comprehension was dawning, and with it the knowledge that he had been an arrogant fool to have made the assumption he'd made.

"Eighty years of the Khitomer Accords," he said cautiously, knowing despite his consternation that he could not project his own hypothesis onto his subject. "Eighty years of…  _peace_  between the Federation and the Klingon Empire."

"Yes!" Martok said emphatically. "I expect our respective diplomats will be ordering some sort of celebration. Humans make much of significant anniversaries, do you not?"

He should have seen it. It made perfect sense. How many times since last night had Julian struggled to reconcile this grim but honourable and even gruffly considerate man with the wild-eyed warmonger who had led a fleet against a civilian government and laid violent siege to Deep Space Nine? He had even snapped at Deyos this morning, saying that hostilities would have ended between the Klingons and the Federation months ago, if not for the agitation of the Changeling spy who had replaced General Martok.

But it had never occurred to him that, if not for the infiltrator, the war might never have started at all.

"How long have you been here?" Julian asked hoarsely.

Martok grimaced. "Two accursed years," he spat. "At least, that is my guess. Time moves strangely here. Keeping count of the days… is not helpful."

Julian did not give that remark much thought. "You were here before Tain?" he asked, his mind whirring over the chronology of the last twenty-four months. " _Before_  the survivors of the Romulan-Cardassian fleet were brought to the camp?"

"Indeed." The word was dark and heavy, laden with the burden of his long captivity. Martok shook his head bleakly, resentment burning in the eye that stared down at the taloned toe of his boot. "Two years, that I might have spent aboard my new command, strengthening the fleet, preparing the Empire for war against the Dominion. Two years, in which I might have brought honour to my family and my people, wasted  _here_!"

He spat the last word, wafting a broad gesture of hate and disgust at their surroundings. He must have jarred his tender elbow as his other arm swung, because he stiffened abruptly, arrested the motion, and gripped the side of the table instead, shifting his hips uncomfortably. He fixed his penetrating stare on Julian.

"Do you know anything of the news from Q'onos?" he asked. What he surely meant as an officer's businesslike request for intelligence from the field had the unmistakable undertone of a desperate plea. "Can you tell me anything of what the imposter did in my place, before the Order of the Bat'leth brought an end to its worthless life?"

Julian nodded, a tight, quaking motion that sent a fresh ripple of pain through his skull. Everything he had believed about the political situation in the Alpha Quadrant since the collapse of the treaty was crumbling. He had assumed — everyone on Deep Space Nine had assumed — that the war had been the inevitable result of factional politics, Klingon infighting, and the constant stressors of sharing a very crowded corner of the Galaxy. That, and the fanatical jingoism of one General Martok. Now it turned out it had been engineered by the Founders from the very beginning.

Divide, and conquer. The fall of Tain's joint fleet had crippled the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar, essentially eliminating the threat to the Dominion posed by Cardassia and Romulus. And so they had sent a Changeling to turn the only two remaining great powers against each other, in the hope that the Empire and the Federation would simply finish each other off.

"It started a war," Julian said at last, knowing that he owed Martok the truth. He would want the truth, in the General's place. Six months from now, a year from now… he might be sitting right here, questioning a newcomer himself, trying to gauge how much chaos and bloodshed had been brought upon Starfleet by the actions and machinations of one Doctor Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine.

It took all of his courage to drive back that terror and find his voice again. "The Changeling that replaced you, it led an invasion of Cardassia," he murmured. He had brought news of the death of loved ones with less strain on his soul. But as devastating as such losses were, this was somehow worse. For a patriot, a loyalist who loved his homeworld and his people as deeply as Martok obviously did, was there any more terrible tidings?

"When my Captain — when my colleagues —" Julian closed his eyes and swallowed hard. There was no point in mincing words. "When my friends and I took steps to protect the Cardassian lawmakers from illegal capture, your replacement called for revenge. He lead an assault on Deep Space Nine, where I'm stationed. Gowron abandoned the Khitomer Accords on the Changeling's advice. The Federation and the Klingon Empire have been at war ever since."

The silence was interminable. He could hear Martok's laboured breathing, but Julian could not bear to look at the General. He kept his eyes closed, curled forward over his lap with his elbows propping him against his thighs, and he hung his head, and he waited.

"How many have died?" asked Martok.

"Hundreds of thousands," Julian whispered. His lips scarcely moved. "There have been battles on almost all of the border worlds, firefights between the fleets, raids deep in Federation space. For a few months, it seemed as if the Klingons were so hungry for bloodshed that they would roll out across the Quadrant, whatever the cost."

"And since the shapeshifter was discovered?" Martok pressed. "Since I am believed to be dead?"

"Gowron hasn't been calling out for blood as loudly as before," Julian admitted. "But other factions on the High Council…"

"Other factions are hungry for glory, and they do not care how they have been manipulated," Martok agreed dourly. "It is our way."

"They don't know that the war was started by the Dominion," Julian tried to explain. "No one knows. They assumed you were replaced only a few months before the infiltrator was discovered. Everyone thinks…"

"Everyone thinks it was I who started the war." Martok made a noise of disgust, a tectonic rumbling deep within his chest. Then he grunted in comprehension. "And that is why you fear me. Because you saw in me your enemy, the man who had attacked your space station. The man you and your friends defied by rescuing the Cardassians."

Julian tried to nod, but couldn't. His head felt as dense as a black hole, dangling between his shoulders. He was ashamed of his assumptions, of his fear, of failing to give the benefit of the doubt to a man who was in the identical, untenable position he was now in himself.

"Yes," he breathed, exhausted beyond comprehension.

There was a sound of shifting limbs and the clank of chainmail. Julian stiffened, expecting some kind of reprisal. If he got lucky, Martok would simply storm from the room, disgusted by his presence. If not…

A hand closed on his shoulder, gripping tightly but not painfully. It was firm and steady, grounding him. Julian raised his head at last, looking up at the Klingon's grim countenance. Solemnity was writ across his features, but there was something softer in his lonely eye. Compassion? Empathy.

They looked at each other for a long, silent interval. When at last Martok spoke, his voice was not gentle, but it was grave and very low.

"What is your name, Doctor?" he asked. "When you did not give it before, I thought it an oversight. Now I think you were afraid I would recognize it, if I was the one who led the assault on your posting."

"Bashir," Julian said. He flicked his tongue over his lower lip, trying to wet it. "Doctor Julian Bashir."

Martok nodded, exhaling thoughtfully. "It is a warrior's name," he pronounced solemnly.

There was no higher praise in the Klingon lexicon.

_(fade to black)_


	11. Teaser: The Unreliable Narrator

 

**Part III, Teaser: The Unreliable Narrator**

 

When she excused herself from the wardroom, leaving Benjamin and Kira to admire the Bajoran artifact newly recovered from the grasping hands of the Cardassian government, Jadzia made straight for the Docking Ring. The transport from the Meezan Sector was due in at 1500 hours, and she didn’t want to be late.

 

It was a quiet afternoon for incoming traffic, and the walk was a pleasant one. It was nice to stretch her legs, and to luxuriate in the comfort of business as usual. The last few months had been tempestuous and sometimes terrifying: punctuated with moments of joy, to be sure, but overshadowed by the Klingon war and the ever-present threat from the Dominion.

 

 _And new love_ , Emony cooed, wanting to wriggle in girlish delight. Emony always had been the romantic. Jadzia allowed her third host a sparkling little smile, but that was all. Her blossoming romance was a source of daily delight, but at three hundred and fifty-five years old, the redoubtable Dax was too dignified to go swanning about the corridors like a dewy-eyed teenager.

 

 _Dignified?_ Curzon laughed, a boistrous sound that filled Jadzia’s mind and made her lips twitch with amusement. _Dignity is overrated, my girl: live a little!_

 

 _We’re not here to talk about Worf_ , Jadzia admonished, reining in these two troublemakers before the others could join in the chorus. That was her job, as the current host: to curate all of the various personalities, the competing memories and opinions, so that she, Jadzia Dax, could function as a united whole. Sometimes it was like herding children. _We’re here to meet the transport, and then we’ll have lunch._

 

There were only two other people waiting outside of the airlock: a Bolian ensign whom Jadzia didn’t recognize, and Corporal Amrys from Station Security. She was out of uniform, her hair elaborately coiled in one of the fashionable Bajoran styles. Jadzia had briefly experimented with a Bajoran chignon a couple of years ago. It was entirely too much work.

 

 _A woman’s hair is her crowning glory_ , Audrid opined. _And you have such_ beautiful _hair, Jadzia_.

 

The effort to restrain a laugh that would have been inexplicable to the others in the corridor was tremendous. When she was newly Joined, Jadzia had skirted that sort of thought from Audrid as self-indulgent and vain. Now, whenever it popped up, she thought of Quark with the brush in his hand, and had to resist the urge to give in to the hilarity. A Trill’s idea of gender roles might be as fluid as the boundaries between the blended experiences of eight lifetimes, but for a Ferengi they were so entrenched as to be practically immutable.

 

There was a hiss as the airlock repressurized. Then the giant cogwheel of a door rolled aside. On the far end, where the other port was sealed on to the transport’s hatch, the first passengers disembarked. They were a couple, a human and an Andorian arm-in-arm, with a bright-eyed sheen of young affection that Jadzia had recognized in the mirror on more than one occasion in the last few months. _You see? You can’t stop thinking about Worf, either!_ Emony sang triumphantly.

 

Three more passengers passed by before the first of the welcoming committee was satisfied. Corporal Amrys’s face lit up as an elderly Bajoran woman leaning on an intricately carved cane stepped carefully over the lip of the airlock. The young security officer embraced her warmly, taking her free arm and guiding her up the corridor towards the Habitat Ring. They murmured happily together, and Jadzia watched them go, contentedly.

 

The Bolian had met his party by the time she turned back to the airlock: they were moving off in the opposite direction. A pair of junior officers in Engineering gold were next, and then the airlock was empty.

 

Jadzia waited, watching the thoroughfare and the first few metres of ship’s corridor beyond. She even caught herself squinting, as if that would allow her to peer around corners or see through bulkheads. Three minutes stretched to four, with no sign that anyone else was coming to disembark. An uneasy ripple passed through Jadzia’s right abodminal cavity: Dax, stirring within her. 

 

 _Something’s wrong, something’s wrong_! Tobin moaned. He always spoke up when she felt the faintest stirrings of anxiety, no matter how irrational. _Something’s happened. He’s gone off again. Something’s wrong!_

 

Well, it wasn’t _completely_ irrational. The last time Julian Bashir had attended a medical conference, he’d picked up a distress signal on his way home and diverted himself right onto the front line of the war with the Klingons. He and Jake had made it home safely in the end, but not before the good doctor had spent several days operating under fire, sustained severe plasma burns to his arm and shoulder, and helped to evacuate an entire field hospital while enemy forces shelled the compound. Jadzia had been relieved when he announced he would be chartering a berth to and from Meezan IV this time, instead of requisitioning a runabout.

 

 _A man’s got to live a little!_ Torias argued boisterously. _Can’t spend your whole life idling on a porch swing, can you? You ought to know that: you’re a Starfleet officer, same as the two of us!_

 

Jadzia did know that, and in Julian’s place she would have responded to the colony’s call for aid, too. That didn’t mean she hadn’t been grateful to know he wouldn’t be tempted into any dangerous detours this time. She was looking forward to having all of her friends and crewmates safely back on the station at the same time again, and Julian truly was a very dear friend.

 

It had been six minutes now since the last passenger had passed through the airlock. Maybe it was time to make good use of her rank. A Federation transport captain might not enjoy an impromptu visit from a Starfleet lieutenant-commander asking to see the passenger manifest, but they would hardly refuse her entry.

 

She moved to step over the rim of the porthole into the airlock, when a lanky body strolled into view at the far end. Julian had his cylindrical kit bag slung over one shoulder, and he paused to sweep his eyes over the seal of the transport ship to the docking ring before stepping onto the station. He took a couple more steps before he noticed her, now smiling radiantly to greet him.

 

 _See? Nothing to fret about_ , Leela said sensibly. _Just took his time leaving his cabin. Probably got caught up in his reading or something._

 

 _Meezan IV is hardly a high-priority target for the Klingons,_ Torias teased. _Luxury hotels and manicured “wilderness” trails. The truly stout of heart can go diving off the Rainbow Falls into the Lagoon of Serenity!_

 

 “Dax!” Julian looked surprised and a little flummoxed. He blinked at her twice in a hitching rhythm.

 

“Welcome home!” she said warmly. It was a little odd that he hadn’t greeted her by her first name, but she didn’t think much of it. She’d caught him off-guard, lost in thought: that was all. “How was your trip?”

 

“Uneventful.” He closed the distance between them, the smile finally breaking across his young face as he stepped down into the corridor. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here.”

 

She laughed. “Did you think you could just sneak back onto the station, and no one would notice until you reported for duty tomorrow? Of course I had to come and welcome you home.”

 

Julian started up the corridor, and she fell into step beside him.“You drew the short straw, did you?” he chuckled.

 

Jadzia had long since learned to be on the lookout for these little, self-effacing remarks. Julian would toss them out there lightly, as if just contributing to the general banter, but underneath there always seemed to lie a fragile thread of insecurity: a niggling belief that those around him might really think so little of him that they’d hold a lottery to see who got stuck collecting him from the Docking Ring, for instance.

 

Not today, though. Today there was nothing but amiable teasing in his words.

 

 _That’s odd, isn’t it_? A seldom-heard voice insinuated itself into the core of Jadzia’s mind, like a stern-eyed watcher stepping out of the shadows. _Where’s that pathetic need for affirmation? Like a puppy, so eager to please._

 

 _Don’t be cruel_ , Audrid scolded. _You know Jadzia doesn’t like it when you think ill of her friends._

 

 _She doesn’t like it because she knows I’m right_ , sneered Joran. _If I’d had my say when they first met, we never would have put up with all that fawning, much less overlooked his previous behaviour when he finally decided to grow up a little._

 

 _Be quiet_! Jadzia commanded. Audrid was right: she hated it when Joran criticized the people she cared about. The things that sprang from the dark swirls of his personality were so unlike anything she would have thought herself, even in the early days when Julian had been rash and fidgety and maybe just a little obnoxious. But the thoughts were still a part of her, and she bore some responsibility for them. Failing to quash them whenever they arose would be a disservice to her friend.

 

“Did you learn anything useful?” she asked. “How was the seminar on early neural grafting intervention?”

 

It was the particular item on his schedule that he’d been most excited about before his departure. Now, though, Julian only shrugged. “Useful enough, I suppose. How’s everything in Ops? Any trouble with the Klingons?”

 

“Fine, and no, not out here,” Jadzia said. She reached to tweak the crisp fabric of his sleeve. “You’ll have to change your uniform: the new ones were issued yesterday. They were supposed to be manufactured to our measurements, but I’ve already had to have Garak let down my inseams.”

 

“You look lovely,” Julian said earnestly, smiling broadly at her. Perhaps a little bit too broadly, but then there’d been a little awkwardness between them since he and Leeta had dissolved their relationship. Jadzia suspected that a small part of him still held a torch for her, and seeing her contented in her new romance while he was still freshly out of his couldn’t be easy.

 

“I like the vests,” she said, keeping the tone light and conversational. “They make the uniforms more adaptable to temperature fluctuations. The next time we’re trapped in the cold, we’ll last a little longer.”

 

A flicker of confusion creased his brow, as if he were trying to remember what she was talking about. Jadzia felt a little pang of hurt. Their time marooned in the _Defiant_ ’s turbolift was a treasured memory for her. Yes, they had been half-frozen and uncertain of timely rescue, and she’d inhaled a few lungfuls of fluorine gas, but they had shared important words and a tenderness that transcended physical desire. She marked that day as the moment their friendship had truly grown into its own.

 

 _You’d think he’d remember_ , taunted Joran. _He finally got his hands where he wanted them!_

 

 _Don’t be crass_. This was Curzon, annoyed and probably just a little hypocritical. Jadzia didn’t care. She was glad to have him leap to Julian’s defence. _He was a perfect gentleman._

 

 _It was huddle together or freeze to death,_ Leela reflected. _You’ve got to make allowances._

 

 _I like him_ , Torias smirked. _Running into a vented corridor after a hull breach takes nerves of steel._

 

 _We all could have died!_ Tobin lamented.

 

This wasn’t a fruitful train of thought. Jadzia swept them all up into silence again. “Julian?” she called, as the doctor walked on past the turn into the bridging corridor that would take them in towards the Central Core.

 

He turned around and came loping back, grinning abashedly. “Sorry, Jadzia: let my mind wander,” he said. “Too much new information floating about: I haven’t sorted through everything I’ve learned this week yet.”

 

“I certainly understand what that’s like,” she told him, grinning.

 

“I imagine after making peace with seven lifetimes’ worth of memories all at once, a medical conference isn’t much to synthesize,” Julian said modestly. He scratched the back of his neck. “I’ll have to get myself sorted out before I catch up on my patient files. How’s Odo?”

 

“He and Quark are have both made a full recovery,” Jadzia assured him. Julian didn’t like to hand off his cases halfway through, and though both the bartender and the Chief of Security had been well on the road to recovery when he left, of course a follow-up would be foremost on his mind upon his return. “Their experience doesn’t seem to have left them inclined to be any more honest about their friendship.”

 

“Too much to hope for, I suppose,” Julian chuckled. Jadzia’s smile blossomed again. It was good to have him home. “I worry about Odo, coming to terms with being a Solid. Especially after something like this; it has to have driven home the frailty of his new body.”

 

Jadzia glanced at him uneasily as they turned into the Habitat Ring. “Solid?” she said. “Don’t you find that word a little… well, pejorative? Particularly applied to Odo.”

 

He looked at her in mild surprise. “What word should I use, then?” he asked, in a tone that suggested she was being absurdly sensitive, but he was willing to put up with it anyway.

 

 _Interesting_ , Joran murmured darkly. _He usually minces around people’s feelings, doesn’t he? What’s wrong with the Doctor today?_

 

“Humanoid?” she tried. It wasn’t quite right, either, and there was some debate about the Earth-centric term in social linguistic circles. But at least it wasn’t the disdainful label slapped across the entire expanse of single-form life in the Galaxy by the species bent on subjugating them. “Odo said you told him his internal anatomy is functionally human.”

 

“Very well.” There was a curious blankness to these words, but Julian smiled again. “Is this where we part ways? You must have more important things to do than seeing me right to my door.”

 

“Actually, I thought we could have lunch,” Jadzia suggested. “It would give us a chance to catch up.”

 

She expected him to accept the invitation eagerly. They didn’t often have the time to dine together, just the two of them, and they always enjoyed each other’s company. But Julian only shrugged sheepishly.

 

“If it’s all the same to you, Jadzia, could we do it another time?” he asked. “I’d like to unpack and get settled in, and I could use a shower. There’s not a lot of privacy on a transport ship, and it would be nice to have some down time before I need to be back at work.”

 

 _He loves his work_ , Joran whispered, with the crawling certainty of intuition. _It’s not a chore for him. Not something he “needs” to be “back at”. Fresh from a conference, full of new ideas, he should be eager to dive back in._

 

Jadzia hesitated, wondering. She was used to exercising a healthy measure of skepticism when it came to Joran’s accusations and flights of paranoid fancy. He was what her Comparative Galactic Literature professor at the Academy had described as an “unreliable narrator”: not to be trusted. But something about this rang true.

 

 _It’s true, of course it’s true!_ Tobin twittered anxiously. _There’s something wrong, Jadzia, don’t you see? There’s something wrong with HIM!_

 

It was the second voice of doubt that decided her. Tobin’s unsteady protestations stuttered along behind every doubt, insecurity or fear she had ever experienced since her Joining. She had learned never to listen to his anxieties unless they were borne out by the unease of the others. Otherwise, she would never take a risk, perform a dangerous task, or initiate a single social interaction again. If Joran and Tobin were the only ones uncomfortable with Julian’s behaviour, then it was paranoia and nothing more.

 

 _Anyone else_? she invited, just in case.

 

 _He’s tired_ , Emony said sympathetically. _He’s right about transport travel. It’s not exactly luxurious_.

 

 _Even the most passionate of us don’t always look forward to the first day back at work,_ Torias supplied. _I know_ I _don’t._

 

 _Sweet boy_ , said Audrid. _He’s doing his best._

 

 _Seems like his usual self to me_ , Leela added, a little boredly. She never did have much use for the foibles of men.

 

 _You know him better than we do_ , said Curzon, with a confident nod. _Trust your instincts_.

 

 _Her_ instincts. Not Tobin’s and certainly not Joran’s. And her instincts were telling her that Julian was his usual good-natured self. A little far away right at the moment, maybe, but then, he’d told her once that he found medical conferences exhausting as well as stimulating. Medicine was a grim profession, seeded with death and the spectres of the people you couldn’t save. It was only natural to need to recharge now and then.

 

“Absolutely,” she said warmly, pulling him into a quick hug. He moved willingly enough with her, leaning in, but it took him a second too long to clap a palm onto her back to reciprocate. Poor man: he must be far more tired than she’d thought.

 

“Get some rest,” she instructed. “If you’re up for it later, call me and we can get some supper instead.”

 

“I’ll do that, thanks,” Julian said, easing out of the hug and giving her arm an affectionate squeeze. He looked pleased and a little embarrassed. He didn’t need to be: she was glad he felt able to confide in her when he wasn’t feeling up to socializing, instead of just putting on a brave face and enduring it out of politeness. “If I’m feeling up to it.”

 

“All right,” she said warmly. As he started down the corridor, she called out to him. “Julian?” He turned, eyebrows raised. “I’m glad you’re home.”

 

He raised a hand in a little wave of thanks, and walked on. Jadzia watched him go, until his lean silhouette disappeared around the curve of the corridor. She hoped he was all right. Joran’s ridiculous assertions and Tobin’s vague imaginings aside, there _was_ something a little off about Julian today. Fatigue probably explained it. She hoped so. She had been worried about him at times since he’d ended things with Leeta. She hoped he wasn’t depressed.

 

 _He has the eyes of a killer, little girl!_ Joran hissed. _Didn’t you notice_?

 

 _JORAN!_ It would have been a scathing admonition if she had uttered it aloud. Jadzia was horrified. Needling her about Julian’s youthful idealism was one thing, but this sort of senseless slander was disgusting. And Joran was a fine one to accuse others of having the eyes of a killer. 

 

Jadzia Dax closed her mind resolutely to the voice of her sixth host and started for the Promenade.

 

( _fade to theme_ )


	12. One Further Indignity

** Part III, Act I: One Further Indignity **

Julian was performing his second post-reduction check on Martok's arm when Tain returned. The Klingon's fingers were mobile and free from any sign of neuralgia, and one hand was now just as hot as the other. All this was promising, and he apprised his patient accordingly, but Julian's private prognosis was more guarded. Without the anti-inflammatory cocktail that would have repaired the damage to the ligaments and the joint capsule over the course of a couple of days, the elbow needed to be immobilized for at least a week, preferably two. What Julian wanted was a splint, but short of dismantling one of the beds he saw no means of obtaining the necessary materials. And if he tried that, Barracks 6 would fail tomorrow's inspection; he wasn't willing to gamble on what the punishment for that might be.

Nor did he know how long the Jem'Hadar would allow the General to stay out of their arena to recouperate. They had all been very eager to take their turn with him today. If they compelled him to fight tomorrow, or the next day, the chances of the elbow staying in place for longer than five minutes were dismal.

Julian looked up from examining the outraged joint when the door shrieked open. Enabran Tain crossed the threshold, looking about in his ebullient, aristocratic way.

"Looks like everything is well in hand here!" he said cheerfully. "Did the dear Doctor put your arm to rights, General?"

Martok made a low sound of appreciative agreement. "That he did," he said, stretching his forearm smoothly. He was not guarding the elbow joint as most patients would have after such an ordeal, but neither did he force the motion or extend too far. He jerked his chin at Julian. "Doctor Bashir is a man who knows his craft."

"So I've been told," chuckled Tain. He sidled forward, holding out a dark bundle. "I've brought you a reward, Doctor."

Julian frowned, nonplussed. "A  _reward_?" he echoed in disbelief. It seemed like such a nonsensical idea, and not only because accepting any sort of recompense for care flew in the face of his principles. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, a token, then," said Tain dismissively. "A gesture of thanks from all of us who may need to avail ourselves of your services in the future. Go on! Take it!"

He thrust the bundle into Julian's arms. It was one of the prison blankets, coarse and threadbare and gathered into an untidy ball. Julian turned it over in his hands, half-expecting to find something wrapped up inside it. There was nothing.

"A… blanket." The words came flatly. Julian was mystified.

Tain was still needling him jovially. "Aren't you pleased? I've heard you complaining about the lack of supplies.  _Any dressings at all,_ isn't that how you put it?  _Some gauze, a strip of bedsheet, anything_?"

Julian felt a frisson of unease run up his back and across his shoulders. His forearms prickled with his pilomotor reflex — colloquially, gooseflesh. He remembered saying that, verbatim, but he had said it to Parvok, not to Tain, and they had been alone in the barracks. Or almost alone. His gaze flitted towards the Breen, sitting silently on the middle cot just as they had on that occasion. Could they understand his speech after all? And if so, was the Breen passing conversations along to the former head of the Obsidian Order? And why?

A more concrete objection to the item in his hands found its way to Julian's lips. "Where did you get this?" he asked, turning it over. It wasn't clean: it had the same sour, unwashed stink that all the rest of the bedding exuded.

Tain smiled broadly. "Does it really matter, Doctor? You asked for bandages, and I've brought you the means to make them. Perhaps a sling for our fine General, as well? Dislocations can be  _nasty_  if they're not allowed to rest after setting."

"I do not need a sling," Martok grumbled. That wasn't true, and they were probably going to argue about it latter, but Julian had ample experience with the bravado of a convalescing Klingon. Tain was the more immediate concern.

"It matters if you've taken it from someone who needs it," he said, fixing the older man with a stern, reproachful gaze.

"There you go again with your tales from the Occupation!" Tain laughed. "Refugees, stealing blankets from their fellow Bajorans. Ore extraction personnel in the labour camps, preying on one another for an extra ration. Do you really think a  _Cardassian_  would stoop to such venial pursuits?"

Nothing that Julian knew of Tain, from his own experience or Garak's admittedly elusive allusions, had led him to believe the man was a sincere Occupation apologist. He seemed to heap his contempt equally on both sides: the Cardassian military government who had bungled the operation and the Bajoran freedom fighters they had oppressed and exploited for sixty years. He was only trying to get a rise out of Julian. The trouble was, it was working.

" _Slaves_  in the labour camps," Julian corrected tightly. He wanted to add,  _and you wouldn't be so flippant if you'd ever worked a shift as one_ , but he knew better than to feed Tain any more information about  _that_  uncomfortable sliver of his past. Instead, he addressed the Cardassian's argument; "And I think that anyone can be tempted, after living long enough in a place where the basic needs of the population aren't adequately met, yes. There aren't any extra blankets in this barracks — why should I believe there's an airing cupboard somewhere filled with unwanted spares?"

Tain chuckled. "Has anyone ever told you you're too clever for your own good?"

Julian curled his lip, maintaining eye contact with Tain instead of giving himself the satisfaction of rolling his eyes. "Plenty of people, almost constantly," he said.

The Cardassian shook his head with relish. "I like you, Doctor," he said, cheerfully sincere. Julian knew better than to take any of Tain's vocal tones at face value, but he decided that went double for sincerity. "If I promise that it wasn't taken from anyone with any use for it, will that salve your Federation conscience?"

Julian gave him the thinnest ghost of a cold smile. " _No,_ " he said dryly. "Where did you get it, Tain?"

Instead of answering, he meandered back to the door and slapped the panel to open it, grinning at back at the human the whole time. Julian wondered if he had ever worn that grin in the Obsidian Order's undisclosed interrogation facilities. He felt certain he had.

"Oh, Major!" Tain called out, like a matron calling the neighbourhood children in for lemonade. "Would you join us, please?"

Major Kalenna must have been waiting very near the barracks door, because she entered almost at once. She moved with her usual military rigidity, but her expression was even more guarded than normal.

"Doctor Bashir wants assurances that his gift doesn't come at the expense of someone else who  _needs_  it," Tain explained, his tone making it plain that he thought this all very quaint, perhaps bordering on adorable. "Since I don't think he's going to be swayed by an argument about the hierarchy of needs — one person's medical care, for example, taking precedence over another's warm night's sleep — I thought you could reassure him as to the source of the blanket."

Julian looked questioningly at Kalenna. He had seen no sign that she feared Tain, and although he had no concrete proof, he did not believe she would lie to him. He was certainly more willing to trust her word than Tain's.

"No one will be short a blanket tonight, Doctor," she said levelly. "It was not taken from someone in need."

"Then where did it come from?" Julian asked, uncomfortably aware that his eyes were pleading with her not to lie to him. He could handle Tain's perpetual unreliability. If he had to navigate around an untrustworthy Romulan, he would exhaust his capacity for reason very quickly. And a part of him, he knew, was desperate not to think ill of Kalenna. She had been kind to him from the first, in her own cold way.

"From another barracks," said Kalenna. "They have an empty bunk."

She was leaving something unsaid, but Julian believed her words. He looked down at the blanket, feeling it with his fingertips. It would not make very pleasant bandages, but at least for closed injuries the cloth could be an invaluable support. Martok's elbow, his own knee: both would benefit tremendously from a snug dressing.

"And no one else wanted it?" he challenged, unbelieving.

"Of course they  _wanted_  it!" chuckled Tain. "But that doesn't mean they need it. One blanket to a man. Or woman," he added, with a courteous little nod at Kalenna. She did not acknowledge it. "More than that's not only wasteful, but it foments unrest in the ranks. Put it to good use, Doctor, and spite the Founders."

There was something about that charge that Julian found irresistible. He stared down at the blanket again, hating how much he coveted it. It was smaller than a regulation Starfleet blanket: a hundred and thirty-five by a hundred and eighty centimetres instead of 170 by 230. But torn lengthwise into strips of fifteen centimetres each, that was over sixteen metres of bandages. Less, if he cut a square to fashion a sling for Martok… but still a vast quantity for a doctor who was working with nothing at all.

Nor was it a simple matter of his knee and the General's elbow. With sixteen metres of bandages, he would have been able to bind the Cardassian's ribs. Then perhaps he would have been able to stand straight for the count, and spared himself — and Julian — the tender ministrations of the Jem'Hadar. Resenting the lack of resources that made this dirty thing a prize to be so coveted, Julian made up his mind.

"Can you bring me the knife?" he asked, flicking his eyes in Tain's direction but not quite looking up. He was working the blanket through his hands, feeling the selvedge.  _Ooh, very good, Doctor! I see you occasionally listen to me after all!_ Garak's voice crooned in his memory. He'd learned that word from the tailor. The thought warmed Julian with a glimmer of amusement.

"Knife?" For once, the Cardassian sounded as if he had been caught off-guard. Confused. The glimmer grew a little brighter. Julian lifted his eyes, brows arched impudently. Had the great Enabran Tain, curator of the Galaxy's stolen secrets, actually  _forgotten_ something? The weapon hidden under his bed, at that?

"He means the tool," Martok muttered out of the corner of his mouth. He shook his head in the tight disdain that only a Klingon could communicate so baldly.

"Unless you expect me to tear it with my teeth?" Julian asked innocently, relishing the opportunity to smirk up at Tain.

The Cardassian snorted, trying to look unaffected. Not only forgetful, but troubled by it? That was good to know. Yet there was a part of Julian that didn't quite believe it.

"My dear, would you be so kind?" Tain asked Kalenna.

She brought the knife, its broken edge wrapped in the oily rag. Now that he had it in his hand, Julian thought it looked like the snapped-off half of a service ladder rung, the sort that might be bolted to the wall of an access conduit. He could see the holes in the short, bent end where some kind of rivet had once been affixed. The surface of the short side was badly scratched, its edge shorn almost to a bevel. He unwrapped the other side, the useful side, and set to work.

"I'm glad you've seen sense, Doctor!" Tain declared, striding over to his cot and sitting down heavily. He cupped a hand over each knee, rubbing them thoughtfully before settling with his back against the wall. "You're not on your space station anymore: I suggest you get used to it."

Julian didn't respond. He was occupied with trying to make a start on tearing the blanket. The shard of scrap metal hadn't really been sharp enough to slice open his palm: it definitely wasn't up to the task of cutting through the rough fabric. He managed to work the acute point of the splintered edge between the weave a few finger-widths in, and tried to force it. The cot beneath him squeaked and rocked as he worked to saw through to the edge. When he finally succeeded, Julian got a firm grip on the short tail he had created, seized the other side of the clumsy cut with the opposite hand, and yanked them as hard as he could in opposite directions.

With a sundering, whistling sound, the blanket tore swiftly and perfectly along the warp threads. Julian had to tug a little harder to separate the last few centimetres, but then he had a long, narrow coil of cloth in one hand, and the remainder of the blanket in the other. Disproportionately satisfied, he rubbed at his right wrists. The bruises he had earned from the Jem'Hadar at the water station were aching from the effort: a minor annoyance. He picked up the clumsy tool and began again.

By the time he had three strips, his palms felt sticky with the residue on the blanket, and the musty smell of it seemed stronger. The idea of applying these filthy rags to the body of a patient, even over a closed injury, repulsed him. Julian dusted his hands pointlessly together, unable to brush away the unpleasant feel of the grime, and gathered up the lengths he had torn. He got awkwardly to his feet, drawing an eye from Martok, who had been gazing off into the middle distance as he swung an idle foot.

"I'll be right back," Julian assured him, though the Klingon looked only curious, not concerned.

His knee had stiffened considerably while he sat, none the better for the morning's ill-treatment or the afternoon's acrobatics. Julian's first couple of steps were ungainly almost to the point of toppling over, and he caught himself awkwardly against the door panel. But once he was out in the corridor, he settled into a rocking limp that was not significantly more painful than sitting on the sagging cot had been. He made his way quickly past the doors to the other barracks, and went into the waste reclamation room.

There were two other prisoners inside, both Cardassians. They were attending to their business, and Julian politely averted his gaze as he hobbled to the niche in the wall. He coiled up the tangle of cloth strips loosely, and crowded them into the sterilizing device. He found the icon on the control panel that, after several bouts of trial-and-error yesterday, had eradicated the wounded Cardassian's blood from his hands. Julian pressed it. When he had tried this before, the alcove had glowed a pale violet, and the visible contaminants had vanished, leaving his hands clean and tingling. Now, the alcove stayed dark and the panel itself flashed an eye-scalding yellow, emitting a sharp chirp of disapproval.

Frowning, Julian tried again, with the same result. Although he knew he had pressed the right glyph, he found himself questioning. He tried the other buttons, each in turn. Each time, he got the same yellow flash. The pitch of the accompanying noise was intensifying, too, so that his return to the first icon produced a sound that made him work his jaw against the piercing pain in his eardrum.

A bony grey hand swatted him aside, and Julian had to skitter in order to keep his feet. One of the Cardassians was glaring at him.

"Idiot human!" he barked. He swept the bandages out of the cleansing unit with the back of his hand, and Julian had to reach in hastily to keep them from falling to the vile floor. The Cardassian thumbed the panel and thrust both hands, fingers flat and splayed, into the niche. It glowed briefly violet, as Julian had expected it to do for him.

He was batted against the wall when the Cardassian pushed past him, slamming the angled shoulder of his service armour against Julian as he went. The other one scuttled up, looking uneasily after his comrade as he cleaned his hands. He made no attempt to castigate or manhandle Julian, but he cast several uncomfortable glances at him as he made his retreat. He had to navigate around another prisoner in the doorway. Julian barely registered that it was Major Kalenna as he turned back to stuff the rags back into the alcove, blindly frustrated.

"It will not work," the Romulan woman said, as Julian pressed the panel again and elicited the same ghastly yellow light. She was standing aloofly back, her tone dry and factual. But he could not help but notice that she had bothered to follow him; had anticipated what he wanted to try.

"Why not?" he said sourly, trying again.

"It must have a scanner set to detect large concentrations of inorganic matter," said Kalenna. The analytical tone of her voice was undercut with a cold current of disgust. "Or dead organic matter, if we are to believe those blankets are a fibre found in nature. The alcove will not activate if there is anything in it but hands."

"Anything?" Julian asked, dismayed.

"Anything but flesh, then. If you have good balance and flexible hips, you can get a foot into it," Kalenna said, looking pointedly away. "If it's bare, the machine will clean it. Even a sock is enough to trigger the lock-out. I suppose it would be possible to get your face inside, if you were desperate, but I haven't tried that. I do not wish to blind myself if the sanitation mechanism is too harsh for my optic nerves."

Suddenly, Julian's own face itched. He chafed his palm against his cheek, feeling the crackle of stubble. He hadn't thought about shaving, or the other niceties of daily cleanliness, until this moment. Now, his skin was crawling.

"How do you wash your face?" he asked.

She looked at him quizzically, and for an eerie moment she looked more Vulcan than Romulan, brow ridges notwithstanding. "With water," she said, as if this should be perfectly obvious.

Julian felt himself relax, and he leaned wearily against the wall. "They give us water to wash," he muttered, relieved. He had not seen anything like a shower facility, but even a basin and sponge would be better than nothing. "How often? Every other day? Every three?"

Kalenna's lips tightened with ill-concealed exasperation, and Julian felt his stomach churn with dread. He knew what she was going to say before she spoke, deliberately slowly as if to help him understand a simple concept that seemed to be eluding him inexplicably. "They give us two litres daily," she said ponderously; "to use however we see fit. I reserve a palmful each evening, so that I can wash my face."

Julian digested this. His clothes were rumpled and his undergarments weren't especially fresh, but he was still within that grace period of a few days during which a Starfleet uniform was designed to remain comfortable, clean-feeling, and more or less aseptic, even with continuous wear. The chill of this place would give him a little more time than he'd had, for example, in the bowels of ore processing on the mirror-Terok Nor, because he wasn't perspiring heavily. But soon enough, he was going to start to feel — and smell — increasingly unpleasant. It felt like it was happening right this minute as he stood there, but he knew that was his imagination. Mostly.

And he might spare a palmful from his two litres a day to wash his face, but a proper strip wash would be out of the question. As would rinsing his clothes. He remembered the oily feel of Martok's undershirt, and the stench of body odour under the Cardassian's arming jacket.

He gestured vaguely at the hole in the wall. "Then the reason you know that thing won't clean cloth…" he mumbled.

Kalenna nodded tightly. "Do you think I like the feel of my own filth next to my skin?" she asked, suddenly venomous. "Or that I relish smelling the others and knowing that, in my own way, I stink as vilely as they do? We are a fastidious people, Doctor! This is misery for us."

Julian stared at her, not knowing what to say. Vulcans had more delicate nasal passages than humans. It stood to reason that Romulans did as well — perhaps even more so, if the brow ridges corresponded to a proportionately greater surface area in the frontal sinuses. The smells that troubled him were probably torturous for her.

"I'm… sorry," he said inadequately.

Her expression softened marginally and she sighed. "It cannot be helped," she said. She hesitated for a moment as if pondering whether to say more. "And I was able to rinse… certain garments with my share of your water ration yesterday. I owe you a debt of gratitude for that."

Julian cast his eyes down at his boots, one firmly planted and the other skimming the floor, and said nothing. The part of him that was a doctor rebelled against the idea of using potable water to launder clothes while others pined with thirst — and would have done even if he hadn't been the one pining yesterday. But the part of him that felt like a man suddenly coated with the filth of years instead of the dead skin and light perspiration of a few days ( _Just how few? Two here, and the fourth day of the conference, but how many between? How long since your hasty sonic shower that morning on Meezan IV, before rushing off to the early panel? How long were you under? How long did they have you?_ ) understood Kalenna's decision.

"They really are determined to break us," he said quietly. "Whatever it takes. Denying an honourable death to a Klingon, the cold to torment the Cardassians, keeping us unwashed to wear on the Romulans, and for a human…" A shudder ran up his spine. He thought he understood what Deyos was trying in order to break a human.

"Your people have a reputation for responsible hygiene," Kalenna said. She was trying to sound detached, mildly interested in the ways of alien races. "Perhaps at last Parvok and I have a cellmate with some understanding of our revulsion."

"Cardassians are very particular about cleanliness, too," Julian supplied flatly, thinking of Garak and his pristinely pressed clothes. That wasn't entirely the mark of his adopted profession.

"Perhaps," said Kalenna. "But Tain would dismiss any discomfort if he knew there was another at hand more miserable than he. And the Klingons do not care what they smell like."

Julian wasn't sure he would agree with that, but he couldn't deny they had a higher tolerance for odours other species considered foul. "And the Breen?" he asked, trying feebly to joke. It fell flat, and it didn't make him feel any better.

Kalenna cocked her head to one side, considering. "The Breen smells like ozone and long-chain synthetic polymers," she said. "I can tolerate it."

He thought he saw the corner of her mouth twitch in a ghost of a smile, but if he had lifted her spirts at all, he certainly hadn't bestirred his own.

( _fade_ )

Julian wrapped Martok's arm with one of the strips torn from the blanket, more grateful than ever that he was dealing with a closed injury instead of a gash or a burn or anything else likely to get infected. The coarse cloth was sturdy, and made a good pressure dressing. Martok's elbow wasn't immobilized, but at least it wasn't going to flop around completely unrestrained.

Tain had disappeared from the barracks by the time Julian and Kalenna returned, and Parvok left the room soon after. The Breen was lying down now, gloved hands folded on their chest. When Julian finished knotting off the scavenged bandage, he picked up the remaining length of blanket.

"I think a hundred and twenty centimetres square should make a large enough sling," he said, more because it was his duty to talk to his patient than because he wanted to make conversation. All he really wanted was to fall asleep. To fall asleep, and preferably to wake up in his clean, spacious quarters on Deep Space Nine to discover this whole thing had been some hellish dream. "It may be irritating on the back of your neck, but we can try to anchor it under the lip of your collar."

"I want no sling," Martok muttered. He had risen from the bench, and now paced down to the rear of the room, wriggling his left fingers as he went. "A sling says only one thing:  _weakness_. I will not have the Jem'Hadar think me weak."

"Perhaps if they saw you in a sling, they'd think twice about putting you back in that ring tomorrow," Julian said. "If they pull that elbow out again before it has a chance to heal—"

"Bah!" Martok snorted, waving his good hand dismissively. "They will not put me in the ring tomorrow. They no longer select me every day; not since  _thiiiis_." He dragged out the last word into a dipthong of disgust as he gestured at the tangled scars over his eye socket with two upthrust fingers.

Perhaps Julian wasn't too far gone to feel amusement after all, because he wondered dizzily what the General would think if he explained that where he'd grown up, that had actually been something of a naughty gesture. But he was focused on the debate at hand.

"You need to support that arm," he pressed. "I can't promise a good outcome otherwise."

"And you see me supporting it!" Martok declared, nodding down at where he had his fingers curled around the strap of his baldric. "This is good enough, and when the Jem'Hadar are watching, I can release my hold quickly."

"What about when you're sleeping? Or distracted?" asked Julian. He struggled to his feet, groping up to brace himself against the life support conduit housing that overhung the beds. Once upright, he limped across to his patient. He gave the Klingon a very firm look, and said stoutly, "I'm a reasonable man, General. I'm open to compromise."

Martok's eye narrowed. "I am listening," he growled.

Julian motioned at the other man's garments. "In here, when the guards aren't around, you can tuck your arm inside your vest for support. It won't be ideal, but it won't be as obvious as a sling, either. Out there, you can hold onto the strap. Does that sound fair?"

Martok looked him over with an expression very like the one Commander Worf employed on Quark whenever he suspected the Ferengi was pulling a fast one. But the General nodded at last. "Very well," he acceded gruffly. "Do as you see fit!"

" _Thank_  you!" Julian said, with mock obsequiousness. He managed a little smirk in case the subtleties of the tone didn't translate, and was rewarded by a low half-chuckle from Martok.

The Klingon stood still while Julian unbuckled his belt and helped him to ease his arm out of the sleeve of his vest. The doctor positioned the limb where he wanted it, and then closed the garment tightly to brace it in place. With the belt fastened again, the outraged arm was actually very well supported — almost as well as Julian could have managed with a Starfleet issue splint and all its various accoutrements. As a finishing touch, he recovered Martok's thick outer sleeve from the floor, and laced the top third of it back onto the sleeve head. It hung empty at the General's side, but the thick folds of cloth almost gave the illusion of an arm.

"Now, what about you?" Martok said at last, when all this was done. He nodded at Julian's knee as the doctor limped to his cot and lowered himself gingerly onto it. Julian leaned far to his side, so that he could grope down and snag his canteen where it stood by the leg of the bunk. He took a shallow sip, battling off his pain, and then a deeper swallow when he started to feel a little more control. Then he screwed the lid tightly closed and turned the bottle on its side, pressing the convex steel surface to his trouser leg where the hollow of his patella was buried under a puffy mound of inflamed tissue. The cold of the vessel began to seep through the durable cloth almost immediately, and Julian's eyes fluttered closed in relief.

"Should you not bandage it also?" asked Martok, watchful.

Julian sank back against the wall, leaning crookedly to one side so that he did not need to move his hand or the bottle it held so mercifully against his leg. Most of his thoracic spine settled on the pallet, with his shoulders hitched up against the bulkhead plating.

"Later," he mumbled, letting his chin rest awkwardly on his collar-bone. It was a profoundly un-ergonomic position, but it felt positively delicious. He couldn't fall asleep like this, but he had no intention of moving again until the water grew too warm to be useful. "Ice before compression. Elevate.  _Rest_."

 _(fade_ )


	13. Back from the Brink

_Note: Working out some of my intense Sisko feels from "Past Tense". Won't apologize. Love him so much._

**Part III, Act II: Back from the Brink**

When Julian finally lay down properly, after having bound his knee tightly with a strip of the blanket of dubious origin and performed one more check on Martok's arm, he slept until morning. None of the myriad miseries of the barracks were sufficient to outweigh the crushing enervation of the last couple of days. The previous uneasy night and the his physical complaints were only part of it. Julian felt as if he had been wrung through every possible negative emotion since first awakening in Barracks 6: bewilderment, terror, rage, disgust, sorrow, frustration, mortification, depression, horror.

But not despair, he told himself shakily when he opened smarting eyes to the perpetual grey light of Internment Camp 371. He had not felt despair, and he was not feeling it now. It was just melancholy, perfectly understandable apprehension about what today would bring, and a small dose of irrational, childlike disappointment that he hadn't awakened to discover this was all some awful dream.

The barracks was empty: even the Breen was gone. Julian sat up gingerly, aware of his many aches. Some of it was just the stiffness of exertion and the long hours unmoving on the wretchedly uncomfortable cot. For the rest, his mind took inventory of his injuries. Mouth, right wrist, left hip and left shoulder, bruised; superficial. Left palm skinned, right palm scored by a shallow cut; healing. Small wound over the right eyebrow; scabbed over. The hematoma on the side of his head; pulsating but stable. Intercostal bruising on the right, dully agonizing if he breathed too deeply; nothing to be done but wait it out. Lingering soreness in his left flank; would resolve with adequate hydration. And of course, there was his knee.

He probed around the dressing cautiously. The swelling had gone down overnight: the hours of immobility, the firm compression of the grimy strip of cloth he had knotted over his uniform leg, and yesterday's brief but rapturous session of primitive cryotherapy had all done their work to bring about improvement. The stiffness was worse today, as Julian discovered when he had to struggle to stand, but the pain was much less intense.

Julian was ferociously thirsty, his mouth sticky and foul-tasting. He scooped up the bottle that stood next to the leg of his cot, and felt a horrible wave of consternation when it rose, light and empty, in his hand. He was taken by an instant of blind panic and self-recrimination — why had he let himself drink the last of it before lying down to sleep? — when he remembered with equally abrupt embarrassment that he had a second bottle.

He recovered it, tucked further under the bed, and leaned against the back wall of the barracks to drink. He sucked back the first mouthful hastily, and used the second to rinse his mouth, swilling it around between his teeth before swallowing. Julian lifted a finger to his lips, meaning to rub at his furry-feeling teeth with it, then paused, looked down at the grubby tip, and thought better of that. He could try it later, after he'd cleaned his hands.

He let himself have another few good gulps from his bottle. It had been untouched this morning. He would drink one-third of his remaining litre now, another third after the count, and save the last of it for just before the meal call. It seemed like a positively luxurious plan, which made Julian uneasy. He was accustomed to being able to request water from a replicator on demand and having it appear, sparkling in a pristine glass at any temperature requested, free from rust flakes or any aftertaste, the quantity available limited only by his imagination. Was he really rejoicing over the opportunity to dole out a few hundred millilitres of this chalky, sour-tasting stuff over the course of the next four hours?

Was it really so easy to adapt to inhumane privations?

His whole body jolted with a bone-deep startle reflex as the prison alarm blasted out. He managed to keep a hold on the vessel in his hand, but he jumped so violently that some of the water splashed over the lip. It seemed to burn on the back of his fingers ( _Wasted, wasted!),_ but Julian had other worries. That was the call for the count, and he hadn't made up his bed yet.

He had not moved so quickly since the dormitory computer had failed to wake him on the morning of his Cellular Xenobiology final in his first year at Starfleet Medical Academy. Julian rammed the lid onto his bottle and stowed it under the bed, his other hand already straightening the beaten-down pillow. He whipped the blanket sharply in the air as he folded it, and tucked it around the foot of the hard foam pallet. He was halfway to the door before he even felt the pain of walking, and out in the atrium before he remembered to guard his leg.

He slid into what had apparently become his fixed place in line just as Deyos came strolling out of the administration pod. Julian tried to snap to attention, but the pain in his knee was mounting now, and the sudden correction brought a blinding bolt of agony. He started to curl forward, reaching to clutch at his knee as he jerked his foot back to skim the floor, but a fist closed on the back of his uniform and drew him up straight again.

"Eyes front, Doctor," Enabran Tain warned,  _sotto voce_  behind him. "Overslept, did you?"

Julian drew a ragged breath through his nostrils, teeth set as he forced himself to square off. He put all of his weight on his left leg, letting his right hang heavy with his foot tucked back. It meant locking his left knee, which wasn't a sound strategy for ensuring good venous return, but if he was going to pull himself together he needed to do it without white-hot agony snaking into his pelvis. He would share out his balance more evenly in a minute or two. He promised he would.

He focused on the superficially obvious parts of standing at attention: the spine straight, the shoulders squared, hands at his side, head held erect, and, as Tain had so succinctly put it, eyes front. Julian had never enjoyed parade — Starfleet Medical students did less drilling than other professional streams, but there had always been some — and he resented it all the more now. There was no reason for this. A quick scan of the facility would reveal the precise body count of the population, whether they were gathered in four rigid lines or not. The Dominion was trying to deprive the prisoners of their purpose and their sense of self, so why put them through this reminder of military discipline at all? Simply because they knew it was physically exhausting? Or because it fostered a sense of helplessness and futility?

As Deyos "lost count" at fourteen, Julian thought he knew the answer.

 _(fade_ )

There was one advantage of being the last prisoner on the ringside end of the line: Julian had imminent but ample warning when the Vorta crossed the space towards him. As Deyos counted off the last two prisoners on the other side, Julian surreptitiously planted his right foot properly next to his left. He still kept most of his weight to one side, but his sense of balance was impeccable and by modulating the muscle contracture in each leg he managed to look squarely planted. The dispiriting lighting helped in that regard: in the shadows, his black uniform trousers were not readily distinguishable from their surroundings. He hoped the heathered gunmetal grey of his makeshift bandage did not draw the eye.

The Vorta smiled slowly as he marched through the lighted ring. Again, the Jem'Hadar skirted it at the prompting of the First. Julian made a tiny correction to the angle of his pelvis, a nervous twitch of motion that he wished — too late — he hadn't attempted.

"Good morning, Doctor," Deyos said, cooly saccharine. "You had a busy afternoon yesterday, I understand. Up to your old tricks so soon? It's enough to hurt my feelings: I might almost believe you didn't take anything productive away from our friendly little talk."

Julian knew it was wiser not to speak, but his anger got the better of him. "In that  _friendly little talk,_ " he said frostily; "you promised to shoot the next patient I tried to defend, and threatened to put me in your arena there to fight the Jem'Hadar."

" _Did_ I?" Deyos asked, looking around as if for someone to confirm the events in question. The Jem'Hadar did not react to his querying gaze. The four with the rifles stood solemnly ready. Ikat'ika's eyes were narrower than usual, but there was no other change in his expression. "Dear, dear,  _Doctor_. I'm beginning to think you don't like me."

"Is that why the Founders gave you command of a prison?" Julian asked. "So that people would like you?"

Deyos smiled a slow and silken smile. "No," he cooed. "The Founders gave me command of an  _internment camp_  because I have a reputation for achieving… results. And look! In the three years I have had charge of this place, there have been no riots. No uprisings. No rescues.  _No escapes_. I am very good at my job, Doctor, as no doubt you were once very good at yours."

The tense shift was meant to distress him, but Julian did not let it. He was still damned good at his job, and three days in this hellhole hadn't altered that. His work in the last couple of days spoke for itself, and the Vorta knew it. He said nothing, but continued to stare into the cold, pale eyes widely set in the smug face.

"I must say you're taking it awfully well," Deyos reflected after a moment's chilly silence. "I thought that Starfleet bred its doctors to feel empathy and remorse. The Vorta were engineered to be immune to both, of course, and all the same, if I had lost a patient because I was too busy looking after  _myself_  to check on him, I think I'd at least have the good grace to be ashamed."

Julian's throat closed so suddenly that he might have been in the throes of an anaphylactic response. His heart, a moment ago humming along only slightly strained by his exertions, now hammered out a tattoo of mounting dread. He had been perspiring with the effort of maintaining his deceptive stance. Now his blood ran cold.

"That Cardassian," said Deyos silkily. "The one you were so eager to 'protect' from the guards yesterday morning? He died of his wounds shortly after the ration call. According to the necropsy scan, he ruptured something called his auxiliary spleen? Bled to death  _very_  quickly."

"Accessory spleen," Julian whispered, choking on the syllables. He had checked for signs of internal injury around that organ: he knew he had. He remembered the feel of the Cardassian's cold, scaly skin beneath his fingertips while he palpated his flank. But of course, it probably had not been ruptured during the fight two days ago, but during the subsequent beating on the following morning.

Anger rose within him, molten and horrible. The senselessness of this was galling. His lips worked once, trying to form words, but he could feel hot eyes on the back of his neck. Tain, willing him to be silent.

Julian's mouth closed with a soft  _pop_. He could not look the Vorta in the eyes any longer. He stared off just past the ridge of cartilaginous tissue that ran from Deyos's jaw up to his temples. His legs, one locked and the other taut with the effort of keeping his weight off his knee, began to tremble.

"Is that all you have to say to me?" the Vorta demanded. His tone was mild, but baiting. "A little anatomy lesson, and on we go? Aren't you going to say  _anything_  to me?"

"You had a man beaten to death because he couldn't stand up straight," Julian spat.  _Enabran Tain be damned_. "What more is there to say?"

He saw his mistake in the Vorta's gleaming eyes and the way Deyos's smile broadened like a shark's. This was exactly the sort of thing the Vorta had been hoping to hear.

"I had a man beaten to death because  _you_  don't know your place," he said with relish. "See that you learn it."

Julian shuddered so violently that by rights he should have lost his balance. He half hoped he might. If he were beaten in his turn for failing to stand at attention for the count, that would at least be poetic. But his body was too finely attuned to be toppled by its own reflexes. He kept his feet.

Deyos looked around sunnily, and threw up his hands. "Oh, look at  _that_!" he said, all good cheer and false regret. "I've lost the—"

"One hundred and two," said Julian flatly.

Deyos blinked at him. He wasn't supposed to have the spirit left for insolence. "Wh _at_?" The syllable was clipped.

"One hundred and two," Julian repeated. He could not think, and his insides were churning with horrified regret, but his mouth kept working. "That's the count. I'm one hundred and three, Tain's one hundred and four. See if you can work it out from there."

Deyos made a clicking sound deep in his throat. It was the only indication he gave of his anger. Julian knew he was going to pay for this outburst eventually, but he didn't care. He had challenged the Vorta on his petty game, and now Deyos either had to accept the clarification and move on, or admit that he had been playing.

"One hundred four," he said, his head tilting to one side in that cobra-like fashion peculiar to his people. He kept his eyes on Julian, even as he side-stepped in front of the next pair of prisoners. "One hundred  _six_ …"

_(fade)_

Julian stared at his hands as the alcove glowed violet and the grime disappeared from his skin and his nail beds. He wished it were a sink. He wanted hot water to plunge his hands into, hot enough to take the ache out of his cold knuckles and to open his pores and to scald the first layers of his epidermis. More than that, he wanted to scrub: to rub away not only dirt and oils and sweat, but feelings.

He had lost patients before; many patients. He had lost them in spite of his best efforts or because of his faulty assumptions or even his arrogance. He still had nightmares about the ruined tower on the Teplan homeworld, dawn breaking through the crumbling casements to illuminate a room full of corpses where twelve hours ago there had been living, breathing, trusting people. Julian bore greater responsibility for those deaths than for this one; he knew that. Neither by refusing to give up his boots nor by trying to step up in his patient's defence had he done anything wrong. Deyos could say that he was to blame, but that did not make it so. He had done what he could for the Cardassian. He would have gone to him yesterday in spite of his own condition, if he hadn't been told he wasn't wanted. Even then, there was nothing he could have done about a ruptured spleen without the means to operate. It was not his fault.

But he was having difficulty convincing himself. Among the Teplan bodies, Jadzia had been there to say the things he couldn't make himself believe. And later, Ekoria's hope had spurred him on. Now, there was no one to tell him that this wasn't his fault. No one to reassure him that he had done everything he could. No one to reawaken in him the will to press on, to keep resisting, to do his damned job even though the next failure was practically guaranteed. No Jadzia, no Ekoria, no one at all. Julian was alone.

The door squalled open, and he cringed at the sound. He had always taken for granted the quiet, considerate  _hiss_  of the doors on Deep Space Nine. Here, every one flew open with a whine, and a  _bang_  of outdated pneumatics that was not objectively deafening, perhaps, but had the startling power of a gunshot when you were lost in thought.

And lost he was. Julian lurched past the three Romulans who were coming into the room, swaying with his lopsided stride as he moved down the corridor. The others were in the barracks when he stumbled through that door, enduring the noise and gripping the frame with white knuckles as he propelled himself through. All except for Tain: he had disappeared again. What a surprise.

Kalenna tried to speak to him, but Julian shook his head. Parvok was staring. Even the Breen tracked him, helmeted head pivoting slowly to follow his path. Martok was sitting on one of the benches, arranging his vest to once more support his arm. He was keeping to their compromise, and Julian was distantly pleased by that. But he was fighting for his composure and his sanity, and he could not find the words to affirm the General's sound decision.

He couldn't fling himself down on the bed without wrenching his knee. Julian lowered himself down carefully instead, taking out his need for wrathful motion on the blanket, which he flung over himself as he rolled in towards the wall, shutting out as much of this hateful place as he could. Sleep was out of the question, but he stared resolutely at the tritanium rivets holding the trapezoidal panels in place.

He couldn't channel his thoughts productively, so instead he tried to let his mind go blank. If it hurt too much to feel, perhaps he could make himself numb. A shudder of revulsion and misery shook him, and the joints of the cot-rails squeaked. Julian hoped the others hadn't noticed. Tain would have, but Tain wasn't in the room. There were some small blessings to be had, it seemed.

Julian hugged his ribs so tightly that his bruised wrist ached. It was a self-soothing strategy, one that he hadn't used in years. He tried to pull his arms away, but they only seemed to grip more tightly. The rivets were getting fuzzy around the edges. His vision was blurring. He blinked to clear it, and felt something hot and viscous slither down his temple to soak the coarse ticking that covered the foam pallet. A tear.

He was not going to cry. Deyos, the Jem'Hadar, the Dominion: they could not make him weep. One tear for the dead Cardassian, for a lost patient, he could live with that. But no more. Not for them.

Julian opened his eyes wider, trying to will his lacrymal ducts to close. He fixed all of his attention on the rivets and filled his mind with the molecular structure of tritanium alloy. Metallurgy had never been one of his interests: it took a while to dredge up the information from wherever it had seeped into his brain God-knows-when. It was perfect.

 _(fade_ )

It was Kalenna who made him sit up not quite four hours later. She put his canteen in his hand and stood over him while he drank the last of his water ration, and she did not give any sign of disapproval when he left his bed in disarray. She sent Julian on to join Martok, Parvok and the Breen on the edge of the yard — he had half-forgotten his resolution not to use the Vorta's word. The Romulan woman lingered behind in the barracks for some unknown reason, but she came up beside them as the klaxon bleated out the call to the meal-line.

They had shuffled up several times, Julian increasingly convinced that he would be unable to eat when he drew his ration, when Enabran Tain appeared, puffing a little as he nudged his way into the line behind Julian.

"Hope you're not letting that Vorta get to you, Doctor," he said with his usual cheerful bluster. "They beat that man because they wanted to, not because of anything you said or did."

Julian did not speak. He had been yearning for external reassurance of this, but he did not want it from Tain. He couldn't trust it from Tain. And he was having a hard enough time clinging to the belief that it might be true without hearing it from the lips of a notorious liar.

"Besides," chuckled Tain; "the man was a bully and a thief. It's no great loss."

Julian turned on him. "He was a person," he said quietly, his face twisting with revulsion. "He was one of  _your_  people. One of your operatives. He was a soldier on one of the ships  _you_  brought to the Gamma Quadrant. He was under your command, and you led him into danger, and he wound up here, and they killed him. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Tain's smile widened, but Julian thought he had first seen it waver. "You're thinking like a Starfleet officer," Tain chided. "A leader doesn't have a responsibility to those under his command: they're the ones with a responsibility to him! And as for being one of my operatives… can it be that after all this time in Garak's company you truly don't understand the Obsidian Order yet? Operatives aren't people: they're tools. They sublimate themselves to serve the Order! And when they fail, they're useless tools. What do you do with a useless tool?"

"You throw it away," Julian said, knowing what the Cardassian was driving at, but repulsed all the same. He didn't suppose there was any use in arguing that where he came from, this was a bad analogy. Even useless tools weren't simply thrown away. Miles O'Brien went to great lengths to repair them, and when that failed, they were broken down for parts. In the end, even the molecules could be recycled by the replicators, given new life in some other form. "You don't really believe that, Tain. You can't."

"What does it matter?" Tain sang blithely, wafting a hand up and down the line. " _They_  believe it, all of them. Why do you think they no longer answer to me? Oh, they obey me, yes, when I make my wishes known, but only out of fear. There's no loyalty. And I don't owe anything to those who aren't loyal to me!"

Julian studied him: the dark prince toppled from his throne. The Dominion had cast him down, stripped him of his power, deprived him of comforts and necessities and mental stimulation. But they hadn't been able to take the one thing Tain valued above all else: the ability to manipulate those around him. That his former subordinates still feared him, even when they did not always obey him, filled him with a gleeful satisfaction that Deyos would never be able to pry away. He had thought of Tain as unkillable. Was he also unbreakable?

It was heartening, in a troubling way. But there was something else that needed to be said.

"You don't seem to think you owe much to those who  _are_  loyal to you," Julian said. "What about Garak?"

"What about Garak?" Tain scoffed. "The most useless tool of them all. Why do you think I'm here, Doctor, if not for Garak?"

Julian had no ready answer for this. He didn't know the particulars of what Garak had believed — still believed — to be Enabran Tain's last moments. He had never imagined he might need to know, and so he'd allowed his friend his privacy and not even attempted to press for details. One thing he did know was that it had not been Garak who had come up with the plan to raze the Founders' homeworld.

"Move up!" whispered Kalenna. She was at the foot of the ore conveyor now, handing in her empty bottles. Julian hitched himself forward to close the gap. If he favoured his leg aggressively enough, he was beginning to discover that he could move without much pain.

When the others sat down in their corner, Julian shuffled over to the wall and stood beside the Breen. He put his canteens on the floor by his boot, and leaned against the wall, bracing himself on his good foot and letting the other rest behind. He held his plate close and took the first finger-scoop of mush. It seemed he had an appetite after all. He was ravenous.

"Sit down, Doctor," Tain said, an unmistakable note of exasperation underlying his artful tone of invitation. "On Cardassia, it's rude to eat standing up, you know. Uncivilized. Barbaric!"

Julian didn't look at him. He kept his expression studiously disinterested and his gaze firmly on his food. "We're not on Cardassia," he pointed out dryly. "And I'm not much interested in dining at your table today, thank you."

"Table?" Parvok frowned, looking around as if he expected to see one materialize. Kalenna gave him a cold look to communicate how tiresome he was.

Martok was eating silently, as if he could not hear the talk around him. Julian thought he was listening with interest regardless.

Tain puffed out his chest. "You wound me, Doctor. Truly you do," he said. "I've extended my hospitality, offered you my protection, seen to it you've been made to feel comfortable here…"

"Comfortable?" Julian echoed. He didn't know why, but something had shifted inside of him. He was beginning to feel his spiritedness coming back to him. The darker shades of his sense of humour certainly were. "Is that what I've been made to feel? Words have set meanings for a reason, Tain, and I think you might want to reconsider that one. Or one of us needs to adjust his Universal Translator?"

"As comfortable as circumstances allow, then," Tain amended dismissively. He returned to his oration full force. "And despite all I've done for you, you spurn my invitation! You'd rather stand there like a Gorn raider than sit and share a meal with  _me_?"

His remark about not wanting to dine with the aged Cardassian had a kernel of truth, but Julian had another reason for standing. His knee was feeling markedly better today, but getting down onto the floor would aggravate it — to say nothing of the misery of getting up again. There would be no helping hand from Martok until his elbow healed: Julian would never allow it. So it was easier to eat his meal leaning against the wall. Without Tain's earlier loathsome remarks, though, Julian would have simply admitted this. Instead, he played along.

"I'm very particular about the company I keep," he said, managing an almost airy disdain. "And on Earth, we've been known to eat on our feet from time to time if it's expedient."

"Ah, but we're not on Earth, either!" Tain waggled a finger, sending flecks of the grey grain flying. He examined his finger thoughtfully, and then popped it into his mouth.

"By that logic, you should all stand and join me, not the other way 'round," said Julian. He nodded towards the Jem'Hadar now prowling among the eating prisoners. "Have you ever seen one of them sit down for any reason? Their ships are built without chairs."

"Just how much do you know about their ships?" Tain sounded genuinely interested.

Julian snorted, wondering again why he felt so much more like himself. It couldn't be the food. His stomach was settling now that it had some ballast, and although he was far from full, it was getting hard to swallow the unpleasant mixture. The thiamine taste seemed stronger today, like a whiff of rotting egg in the back of his throat. He picked up another sloppy fingerful, thinking of eggs — not rotten, thankfully, but reconstituted and a little too glaringly yellow. He had eaten them gratefully, sitting on a sheet of cardboard in a concrete stairwell. There had been no utensils on that occasion, either.

Still, Julian thought fondly of those eggs sometimes, and not just when he was trying to choke down Dominion swill. It wasn't the food itself — the eggs a little too rubbery, a little too salty, and a thin, square slice of some kind of 21st Century industrial approximation of bread, bleached-white, spongy, with a too-soft crust and no real flavour at all. What Julian remembered was the feeling of being coaxed out of sleep to find that Commander Sisko had brought him breakfast. A simple gesture of kindness, but it had affected Julian deeply

It had transformed what could have easily been a miserable awakening, lying in the open air in a concrete pit, trapped in the past in one of the darkest periods of Earth's postmodern history, into one that was not only bearable, but heartening. His commander had cared enough about him to rouse himself and stand in line — probably for an hour or more, though Julian had never asked — just so that his subordinate, who had spent most of the previous day chafing against their circumstances and criticizing everything around him, could wake up to a hot (well, lukewarm…) meal. He had huddled against that wall the night before, cold and sore and disheartened, and he had awakened the next morning stiff but smiling, compelled by Sisko's confidence that they were going to extricate themselves from this temporal predicament. All because of a plate of eggs.

Hope was a fragile thing, but sometimes the most surprising things brought it back from the brink.

Julian ran the side of his finger around the edge of the metal pan, scooping up the last of his meal. Not breakfast, exactly, because he had no dinner to look forward to. They hadn't gotten any dinner in the Sanctuary District either, he remembered. He'd been set upon in the food line that evening, and an uncomfortable situation had become a desperate one, with the fate of the future lying in the balance. And they had managed it in the end: Sisko, and Jadzia, and him. Without any of the tools or technology or supports they were used to having at their fingertips, they had managed it. And he would manage this.

He pushed off of the wall and went to turn in his plate. The Jem'Hadar soldier who took it gave him a blank, bored look of detached disdain. Julian shambled quickly out of the way: other prisoners were queuing up to return their dishes. He started back towards the others, bent on retrieving his water ration.

General Martok intercepted him. He had apparently given his own plate to Parvok, but he had four bottles in the crook of his sound arm. He nudged towards Julian, who hurriedly relieved him of two.

"Thanks," he huffed.

Martok nodded distractedly. He looked from side to side with the habitual suspicion of a man who had lived too long in a state of vigilance. "How is your leg today?" he asked. "You are moving more quickly."

"It's improved," Julian confirmed.

"It is not the only thing that's improved," said Martok. "The light of determination is back in your eyes. The Vorta doused it with his words, but he could not extinguish it for long, it seems."

"So it seems," Julian admitted. "I don't know why."

"I do," said Martok. He did another visual sweep, obliged to move his whole head in order to scan to the left. He jerked his chin towards the passage leading back to the main body of the atrium. "Walk with me, Doctor, if it does not pain you too much."

Julian went. Once they were out in the open, Martok started down the length of the common space, stepping in and out of the shadows. His pace was sedate, his heading apparently aimless, but his expression was purposeful.

"Tain," he said, when they moved into the gap between two pairs of sentries. "He angered you."

"He certainly did," Julian sighed, scrubbing the back of his neck with his fingers. He brought his hand around front to scratch under his chin. His prickling stubble whispered against his nails. It wasn't very long yet, but it was already uncomfortable.

"Yes." Martok let out a low growl of agreement. "And then?"

Julian shrugged. He was about to say something dismissive about how Kalenna had called him forward in the line. Then he saw what the Klingon was driving at.

"And then I felt like myself again," he said.

Martok nodded. "After what the Vorta said to you during the count, you were numb. Numbness is deadly here, like the slow bite of the cold on Rura Penthe. Even a few hours — is too long. Tain knows this as well as any of us, but I have never seen him intervene before. Who are you to him, Doctor? It is plain you knew each other from… before."

Julian shook his head. "I'm no one to him. A Starfleet idealist, just like the Romulans keep saying. I broke into his home once, or I thought I did. Turned out he had been expecting me for hours. I was trying to help a patient. A mutual acquaintance, I suppose you could say. But Tain and I, we hardly know each other."

"I do not think any man can be said to  _know_  Enabran Tain," said Martok. "That is not what I asked. I asked what you are to him."

"A nuisance, I should think," said Julian. He thought back to the gleeful way Tain had needled him about standing to eat. "A new sparring partner, maybe."

Martok exhaled his disagreement. "There is more," he murmured, his voice lilting in hoarse harmony. "I know there is more. I have seen him mould people with his words before, bending them to his own ends — but always for his gain or his amusement, never for theirs. What he did today was… different."

The word fell flat, inadequate to describe the unease behind it. Julian was no more comfortable with this idea than Martok, but he was also in no position to quibble over Enabran Tain's motives. He had been been lost in bleak hollowness this morning, dangerously close to that word he was beginning to learn he couldn't even let himself think. And Tain had yanked him back. His heartless words about his fallen compatriot had been today's plate of scrambled eggs. Did it really matter why he had done it?

"There is hope here, Doctor," Martok said. They were almost at the far end of the atrium now, within a stone's throw of the administration pod. The Klingon turned and started back up towards Barracks 6. Julian followed gladly. His knee was beginning to ache, and his left leg was tiring. "I wish that I could say more to comfort you, but I cannot. Just understand that there is hope, even when you cannot see it."

Julian thought those might be the wisest words he had heard since first waking in this place.

 _(fade_ )


	14. Escape, Evasion and Elusive Anamnesis

_Note: anamnesis (n): 1. recollection or remembrance, often vague, especially of past lives. 2. a patient's recounting of their medical history._

**Part III, Act III: Escape, Evasion and Elusive Anamnesis**

"It is an asteroid," Martok said, grimacing ruefully as Julian stretched his left arm to the point of first visible discomfort. He massaged the General's elbow with the side of his thumb as he eased the arm back in again. "The Dominion used to mine ultritium here."

"Tain told me that much," said Julian. They were each perched on one side of the high bench, turned in towards each other. "Is it in a belt?"

"Orbiting a planet," said Martok. "A gas giant, I believe. Our orbit is rapid: sixteen days."

"Like Titan," Julian mused absently, pronating Martok's palm. "Press down on my hands. Now grip my fingers, hard as you can. Harder?"

Martok obliged, and Julian felt his knuckles grind together. He wrinkled his nose as the General let go, rubbing at his first two fingers. "All right, I asked for that," he laughed. "Do I need to test the other hand for comparison?"

"There is nothing wrong with my grip strength. You have set the arm well, and it is healing," said Martok, impatient to return to their other conversation. "What is Titan?"

"A moon," said Julian; "orbiting one of the gas giants in Earth's solar system. It… doesn't matter."

"It is easier not to think of home," Martok agreed. He flexed his fingers, glaring at them. "Those who have seen it report that the asteroid is not large. There is nothing on it but the compound, and the power generators. They are beyond our reach. Outside the dome, there is no atmosphere. Only barren rock and the vastness of space."

"Is there a hangar for the Jem'Hadar ship?" Julian asked. "Or is it in orbit? Touch each finger to your thumb in turn, please."

"There is no ship!" Martok rumbled. He pinched his index finger to his thumb, and then apparently forgot what he was meant to be doing. He fixed his eye squarely on Julian and said in the brisk, unmistakable patter of a tactical report; "Deyos and his men are on fixed assignment. They do not have so much as a shuttle. A transport vessel comes once every thirty-two days, bringing supplies. If replacement personnel are needed, they arrive at the same time."

"Replacement personnel…" It took Julian a moment to understand what Martok meant. "You mean, to replace Jem'Hadar who have been killed."

Martok nodded, making his breathy sound of agreement deep in his throat. "In one month, I slew three with my own hands. Two broken necks, and one ruptured heart. I shattered four of his ribs."

The relish with which he spoke these words would have made Julian uneasy in any other context. But the memory of yesterday's bouts was still fresh: Martok, blind in one eye, battered by long attrition, and fighting mounting exhaustion, forced to face Jem'Hadar after Jem'Hadar until he could no longer rise. He did not share the Klingon appetite for battle, but he thought he could understand Martok's triumph in this.

"When is the supply vessel due to return?" he asked. It was easier for both of them to focus on the tactical situation. "Keep touching your fingers to your thumb."

Martok resumed the exercise. "I do not know," he admitted. "I have lost count. It is… difficult to separate one day from the next."

Julian supposed that it was. He would ask Major Kalenna later. Her intelligence training had probably instilled a reflexive attention to detail. "Does it land, or do they transport the cargo from orbit?"

"From orbit," said Martok. "New prisoners are delivered the same way, at irregular intervals. The ships never linger long, and no goods are ever transported up from the surface."

"Are there inspections?" Julian asked. "Do other Vorta come to look over Deyos's shoulder? Or the Founders?"

"I have never seen a Founder, at least not to my knowledge," said Martok. "As for the Vorta, occasionally there is a woman who comes with the supply vessel. She is one of their doctors, if you can call them that. She was summoned especially when Ikat'ika did  _this."_

He gestured at the place where his left eye had been. Julian could not help raking his gaze miserably over the tangle of scar tissue. He had assumed Deyos and the Jem'Hadar had made clumsy work of the repair, inexperienced with the tools. The idea that anyone styling themselves a doctor, even a Vorta doctor, might produce such indifferent work made him queasy.

"Make a fist," he murmured, forcing himself to focus on the injury he could actually impact. "Is there a way out of the dome?"

"There is an airlock," Martok said. "Beyond the administration pod near the isolation cells. But it leads to nowhere, Doctor. Without a pressurized environmental suit, you would decompress as soon as the outer door was released. Have you ever seen the remains of a man who has undergone an explosive decompression?"

Julian shook his head. It didn't really work that way, except in certain improbable circumstances, but suffocating in the vacuum of space while your cell membranes ruptured was horrifying enough. He had begun this line of questioning not merely to occupy his patient through the exam, which was an unfortunate reminder of mortal frailty that ground on Klingon pride. He had also hoped that he might learn something useful, something that could nudge him towards some sort of plan for escape. He couldn't let himself sink back down into the abyss of despondency, where miseries piled atop one another until the weight was crushing and it seemed easiest just to lie down and stare at the wall. He needed something to occupy his mind, and thankfully the General's elbow wasn't enough of a diagnostic paradox to do that. Escape seemed the natural choice.

Only it was beginning to sound as if escape was impossible.

"What about the mines?" Julian tried. He didn't know what possible advantage there could be to being trapped in the core of this asteroid instead of on its surface, but he felt the need to exhaust every possibility. "There must be tunnels, shafts, caverns?"

"Only accessible from the generator station," said Martok. "Doctor, if it is escape you are considering…"

His voice trailed off, and the lines about his weathered mouth deepened. His eye flicked off to the side, towards Tain's empty cot. He sighed and spread his good hand over his breastbone, chafing the front of his armour so that the chain links rattled.

"There is no way off this asteroid except by ship," he said at last. "Stowing away with the Dominion would be folly. There is nothing to be gained by it. And to take control of a warship full of Jem'Hadar would require more hands than you could possibly get into orbit. Without outside aid, without rescue from a friendly vessel, it is impossible."

Julian tugged down the sleeve of Martok's undergarment, covering the elbow and forearm again. He reached to draw up the General's vest to support the limb, but Martok twisted to reach for the armhole instead. "Help me," he instructed grimly. "I am going outside. I cannot sit here and talk of this with you any longer. It is not honourable."

 _Not honourable to let me dream of an impossible escape_? Julian wondered, but he did not voice the question. He knew that was an non-negotiable pronouncement, and the reasons that Martok considered this conversation dishonourable would be immutable and therefore immaterial to any debate. He helped Martok rearrange his garments instead, sliding the outer sleeve on and lacing it into place. He fastened the bracer, too, so that Martok did not need to rotate his forearm in order to reach the hooks himself.

When they were finished, Martok got to his feet. Julian stayed where he was, but he twisted at the waist to follow the General with his eyes as he stumped to the door. Martok stopped before it and heaved a ponderous sigh that rocked his massive head.

"Doctor…" he began. Then he seemed to think better of it. With a noise of disgust deep within his chest, he slapped the panel that opened the door and marched through.

Julian glanced at the slumbering — or at least, supine — Breen as he straightened himself and spread his palm to kneed his knee through the greasy bandage. He was not used to such guarded company. Tain would not share his thoughts with anyone, of course: for him it was practically a matter of principle. Major Kalenna was reserved and slow to confide in others — the result of her cultural upbringing and her training with the Tal Shiar, no doubt. Parvok was nervous and reluctant to say anything at all without prompting. The Breen was eternally silent. Julian had hoped Martok might be the exception, after the Klingon had confided in him and then offered him insights into his own mental turmoil. But it seemed there were some things even he intended to keep to himself. The human, apparently, would just have to wonder.

The door screeched open again, and Kalenna came in. She did not greet Julian, nor did she take any action upon entering that would have explained the motivated stride that brought her back into the room. As soon as the door was closed, she seemed to lose her purpose. She looked around idly, and then went to sit on her cot. She folded her hands in her lap and gazed resolutely at the opposite wall. Julian did not try to engage her in conversation.

 _(fade_ )

The noise of the guards congregating just beyond the barracks corridor was louder than Julian had expected. He could hear their deep, dispassionate voices and the thunder of their boots on the composite floor. He had made up his mind what he was going to do when he heard them, and yet he hesitated, crippled with dread.

He didn't want to go out there to witness the deed, to see another hapless prisoner hopelessly outmatched against another Jem'Hadar soldier. He didn't want to dive into the midst of the circle of assembled guards, only to find when he got painfully to the ground that there was nothing he could do to help anyway. He did not want to face the revulsion, the powerlessness and the futility that lurked in the arena. But the alternative, skulking in the shelter of the barren barracks when he knew his skills were needed and there was a chance, however slim, that he might be able to ease another person's suffering, was infinitely worse.

In another place, almost any other place at all, he would have snatched up his well-appointed medkit on his way out the door. Here, all he had were two fat rolls of torn blanket and his steady, trusted hands. Julian took what he had, and slipped out into the corridor.

Today's victim — it seemed wrong to think of him as a combatant — was a Romulan. The Jem'Hadar stood aside as the Second led the prisoner into the ring. Unlike Martok, who had strode to meet his destiny of his own accord, this prisoner hung back and had to be dragged forward by the elbow, reluctant and struggling to hide his terror. First Ikat'ika had no inspiring speech to offer, either.

"Today, we face a Romulan," he said dourly. "Observe his weaknesses and remember." And the match began.

The poor man tried to fight, but it was hopeless. The Jem'Hadar's first blow, catching him under the ribs, sent him crashing to the ground, curled up against the pain. He struggled to his feet once, and managed a glancing punch to his opponent's shoulder before a sweeping foot tangled between his and he was thrown flat on his back. His skull cracked sickeningly against the stone floor, and he lay still. Neither the shifting feet of the Jem'Hadar prowling above him nor the murmurs of black disapproval from the spectators could bestir him. On the far side of the ring, Ikat'ika turned his back with a noise of disgust.

For a moment, Julian could not quite believe it was over. He half expected some other unfortunate to be brought forward to take the fallen Romulan's place. But it seemed the Jem'Hadar adhered rigidly to the rules of engagement even when it did not suit their thirst for combat. One prisoner was chosen each day, and made to endure as many fights as he could before he proved unable to rise. Whether that meant nearly an hour of grappling with a Klingon warrior, or less than a minute watching a Tal Shiar clerk being knocked down like a bowling pin, that was the way it was done.

That was the Order of Things, Julian thought darkly.

He slipped between the dispersing Jem'Hadar, his adrenaline response triggered by their brooding displeasure. They looked like they were just waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to release their pent-up energy on a convenient target. But they did not try to prevent him from stepping into the ring, and Julian reached the unconscious Romulan's side unmolested.

He got awkwardly down on his good knee, offloading the bandages in the dust. Wary of tilting the patient's head when there was the possibility of trauma to the cervical spine, Julian placed two fingers behind each tempromandibular joint and lifted the Romulan's jaw instead, clearing the airway. He was just about to manoeuvre his right hand down to check the carotid pulse when long fingers clamped suddenly around his wrist.

Julian had to swallow a gasp. The Romulan, still apparently unconscious, had raised an arm to grab him. He studied the pale, green-tinted face. It was slack and unmoving, but the grip on his arm tightened imperiously. He thought he understood what the man was trying to communicate.

"All right," he whispered, careful that his lips should move as little as possible. He did a quick visual sweep left and right, moving only his eyes. Most of the Jem'Hadar had withdrawn, but a few still stood nearby, speaking amongst themselves in low, businesslike tones. "You're unconscious. I'm just going to check you for injuries."

The hold on his arm went slack, the Romulan's hand slithering bonelessly to rest on his chest.

Julian did all of the things he would have done if he'd come across an unmoving body with no context for its condition. He checked the pulse, counting off the seconds in a low voice so that both the Romulan and the nearby guards would have no doubt about what he was doing. He slid a careful hand behind the patient's neck, feeling for fractures he was now almost certain could not be there. He felt the back of the Romulan's skull where it had smacked the floor, and was surprised to find no signs of trauma at all. Then he shifted his position uncomfortably and began a sweep of the patient's body, tucking his hands beneath the torso and each arm at intervals, checking them for blood each time. None of this was necessary, but it all looked very routine and professional.

Apparently it was boring, also, because the last of the Jem'Hadar tired of watching him work, and moved off to go about their afternoon's affairs, whatever those might be. By this time, Julian's heart was hammering with the anxiety of maintaining the subterfuge. His voice was hoarse and more unsteady than he would have liked when he finally whispered, "They're gone."

"Gone?" the Romulan muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

Julian risked lifting his head to look around more broadly. "The nearest ones are the sentries by the outer pillar," he supplied. "Twelve point eight-six metres."

He cringed at the slip. Thinking in specific distances was one thing. Actually saying them aloud was something he always studiously avoided, except in surgical situations where that kind of attention to detail was expected and positively critical. This Romulan was hardly going to pursue the matter, and there was no one to tell if he did, but that wasn't the point. It had been careless.

The Romulan opened one eye. It was bottle-green and completely lucid, with no trace of fogginess or disorientation or concussion. Julian restrained the urge to squirm as he was studied coldly. The man seemed to reach a conclusion, because his stare relaxed marginally and his mouth tightened with resolve.

"Help me to sit up," he instructed in his rapid, hushed whisper. "As if I am groggy and you are concerned for my welfare."

Julian  _was_  concerned, and perplexed. But he had spent too many dozens of hours in holosuites not to have a knack for playacting. "You're going to be  _o-kay_ ," he said in his best bracing-but-a-little-too-cheerful Doctor Voice. "You took a couple of blows and a nasty knock to the head. Let's sit you up. Slowly, now. Easy…"

The Romulan had the heart of a thespian too, apparently. He was in truth a little too convincing. He exerted only a shaky effort to sit, compelling Julian to do most of the work. He wasn't well-positioned for it, and his right boot slipped when he tried to gain traction. His knee barked painfully against the floor and he rolled his eyes briefly heavenward as he rode the rapidly rising wave of pain. Thankfully, it sank off almost as quickly, and soon the Romulan was upright, bowed over his lap and panting shallowly.

"There, that's better, isn't it?" Julian soothed, placing a hand on the man's back. Under his breath, he muttered, "If there's anything actually wrong with you, you're going to have to let me know."

"Thank you, Doctor," the Romulan puffed. "You are very kind." In a reciprocal subversive whisper, he said; "I am unhurt, and intend to stay that way. Get me to my feet."

"You're going to have to do some of the work yourself this time," Julian whispered, more than a little annoyed. He understood the Romulan's motives for wanting the Jem'Hadar to think him injured, but he wasn't willing to aggravate his own hurts in service of the subterfuge. "I've got a bad leg, and whoever takes your place tomorrow might really need my help getting up."

The Romulan scoffed softly at this, but he nodded his agreement. Julian hoisted himself to his feet, leaning briefly on the other man's shoulder as he did so. Then he made a show of helping the Romulan up. The man bore his own weight, but did a lot of distracting, ever-so-slightly exaggerated pawing at the Federation doctor as he rose. Finally, he was clinging to Julian's shoulder and hanging his head dazedly, letting out a low and very convincing moan.

"Which barracks are you in?" Julian asked, still in his caregiver's tone.

"Eleven," the Romulan yipped. He sagged with apparent weariness and motioned vaguely at the block beyond Julian's. "That way."

When they were out of sight of the guards at last, the Romulan straightened up and disentangled himself from Julian. He tugged at the hem of his tunic, trying to make himself presentable. "You were very convincing," he said with grudging respect.

"So were you," said Julian. "All of that was for show?"

"You have to look like you're trying to fight," said the Romulan grimly. "If they think you're passive, they'll beat you for cowardice — or they'll shoot. But if you're simply inept…"

"Then they leave you in peace once you're down," Julian said quietly, understanding perfectly. The deception would have revulsed General Martok, but he had the feeling that Enabran Tain would respect the cunning of it. Personally, he was just grateful that he didn't have to cope with any injuries beyond his means to treat.

"It is undignified, but effective," said the Romulan. "I would rather have my ribs and my limbs intact than my pride. Remember the strategy when they come for you."

Julian glanced over his shoulder as if the Jem'Hadar might be watching. There was no one within the line of sight of the corridor's mouth. "When they come for me," he echoed softly, trying not to feel the chill of dread in his bones.

"It's only a matter of time," the Romulan said with a sour half-smile. "They've never fought a human before."

 _(fade_ )

Julian made his way slowly back to Barracks 6, staring up at the dome as he went. At ground level, there were window-shaped holes in some of the walls, but they either opened on other passageways, or they were covered by sheets of milky polymer concealing cheerless light fixtures. Higher up on the dome, nine metres above, a few of the circular ports looked out onto the staring night beyond. The glass, or high-tension methacrylate, or transparent aluminium, was scratched and cloudy. Though he could see the vacant heavens and the sky-glow of the planet below, even Julian's keen eyes could not make out any stars.

The two rolls of scavenged bandage lay where he had left them, partly uncoiled in the dust of the combat ring. Winding them neatly again gave Julian something to do with his hands as he loped back to his barracks. Martok had returned, and was once more sitting with his arm braced obediently inside his vest. Parvok stood near Kalenna's cot in a rigid at-ease stance. They were talking quietly as Julian entered, but the Major held up her hand to silence the Sub-Lieutenant as the door screeched closed.

"Doctor?" she said. The casual disdain from the second day was gone from her voice, replaced with an almost collegial respect.

"No work for me today," Julian said. He looked around the room as if to reaffirm that only four of his cellmates were present. "Where's Tain?"

"Occupied," said Martok, resolutely refusing to meet Julian's eyes. The toe of his boot, apparently, was fascinating.

Julian cast a querying glance at Kalenna, but she only nodded her head. "Occupied," she confirmed, with far less dislike of the word than the Klingon had shown. "No work at all? Then it was Sub-Commander Darok in the ring."

"A tall Romulan with bright green eyes and a small cyst in his nasolabial crease?" Julian asked. Kalenna nodded. "Then yes."

"Many have tried his technique. Few escape the ring entirely unscathed," said Kalenna.

There didn't seem to be much to say to this. Julian went to his cot, stowing the bandages beneath, where he had folded the rest of the blanket. There was no sense in demolishing the whole thing at once. He recovered his canteen, still almost full, and sat down to untie the dressing on his knee. He would apply the cold bottle to it for a while, and then he supposed he would rest. There didn't seem to be anything else he could do.

 _(fade_ )

The klaxon for curfew awoke Julian briefly, which it had not done the night before. He stirred on the rigid cot, trying to find a comfortable position or at least to shift the pressure-points to other areas of his body. He was tense with the chill of the room, not quite shivering but poised to start if the temperature dropped even a fraction of a degree. He managed to doze off again, and when he dozed, he dreamed.

He could hear voices, low and strained. He could not make out the words, but they were very close at hand: just behind the frosted screen that sheltered his bed from the broad observation window. The door was always closed when the aliens weren't coming and going. He had tried to get out, but he couldn't figure out how to use the panel. The doors at home were marked with round, green stickers so that he knew which button to press. He didn't know all his colours, but he knew green, because it was the colour of the ground outside, and the fuzz on the trees. A green sticker meant  _push to open the door_. There were no stickers here; only strange, squiggly symbols. He wanted to get out. He wanted to go home. But even when they didn't tie him down to the bed with the broad not-green straps so they could put the machine on his head, he couldn't open the door.

He wasn't alone in the room, now. He hated to be left alone, and they did it a lot. The aliens weren't very good company, but it was better than being alone. Still, he wasn't sure.  _These_  aliens sounded angry. They were talking about him; he understood that much. But he couldn't make sense of the long words they used. That frightened him: he couldn't understand and he was sure that he  _should_.

"…everything when the time is right. I need some assurances," one of the aliens said. He was whispering, but his voice was very hard.

"He has proved himself worthy of trust!" said the other. He had a deeper voice than the first, and it was hoarse. Maybe he had been crying, calling out for his mother, too. "He is a driven man. He needs something to strive towards. You saw him today. You took steps to intervene, as I have never seen you do. You do not want to lose him to despair, either, Tain."

"There's no danger of  _that_ ," the other one scoffed, almost chuckling. He didn't like that, being laughed at. It didn't feel nice at all. It made him hot and sad and sick inside. The children at school laughed at him, when Teacher wasn't looking. He didn't want the aliens to laugh at him, too. "He's an insufferable Starfleet optimist. He'll look for any excuse not to despair, even if it's only so he can feel contempt for me! And today's little performance should be proof enough that he's unstable and unreliable. Tweaking the nose of the Vorta like that — he could have been vapourized where he stood."

He couldn't make sense of one word in five, but he knew about  _Starfleet_. Starfleet officers were heroes. They were the bravest and the brightest and the best. Sometimes he saw them in the high street, or coming out of the library. They always looked so tall and strong in their uniforms, and he knew they would never give up. A Starfleet officer would never give up. Never.

"That was an act of bravery. Foolish, perhaps, but very brave: by now surely you can see that is his way. Perhaps he can be of some assistance to you," the deeper voice pressed, hissing emphatically. "He has the most recent intelligence from the other side of the Wormhole. He will know—"

Julian awoke with a snort, sucking in a mouthful of foul-tasting fabric. He screwed his eyes tightly closed against the light, as for a muddled moment the memories of the hospital room on Adigeon Prime blotted out his sense of time and place and self. The disorienting feeling of fogginess clung to him, as if he was groping at the world around him through a thick, opaque layer of gauze that muffled his senses and addled his thoughts and made imponderable puzzles of the simplest of tasks.

But all that was long ago: the room with the door he couldn't open, the frosted screen by the bed, the shadows of the Adigeon doctors murmuring beyond it. He was a different person now, one of the Starfleet officers he had worshiped from afar, and he was lying on an unyielding bunk in a Dominion internment camp twenty-five years and half a galaxy away from that frightened, lonesome child.

Someone coughed once, sharply, and he heard the  _thump_  of a closed fist on a breastbone. Julian plucked the corner of his ill-smelling pillow out of his mouth, and drew his fingers over his eyes. He blinked owlishly, adjusting to the light, and found himself looking across the way at Enabran Tain's bunk.

The Cardassian sat on one end, and General Martok was sitting on the other. They were both leaning in, heads bowed together as though they had been deep in some important conversation. They probably had been, Julian thought ruefully: whispered voices in the room could well have triggered his dream about the hospital. He couldn't remember much of what had been said. In those dreams, he only ever had a functional vocabulary of a couple hundred words. His imagination was peopled with looming adults who spoke in polysyllabic gibberish, and the feeling that he ought to be able to understand every word of it was more terrifying than almost any of the rest of what happened in those dreams.

 _Those_   _nightmares_. He supposed he was lucky that this time he'd roused himself with a gasp, instead of trying to scream himself awake.

"What's going on?" he asked blearily, hitching himself up onto his elbow and rolling his hip onto the hard ridge of the pipe frame. He groped below, fingers questing for his canteen. The sour taste in his mouth was stronger than ever, and he could not help running his fingers over his teeth in disgust. He dearly wanted to clean them. Forget a sonic sanitizer or a nylon toothbrush: he would have settled for a shredded twig and a pinch of sodium bicarbonate.

"Nothing at all, Doctor. Go back to sleep," Tain said soothingly, one of his grandfatherly smiles lighting up his whole face.

"I am sorry we woke you," muttered Martok. He had been staring at Julian in wide-eyed unease, but now he fixed his eyes on the floor midway between the two beds. "It is some hours yet before they open the doors."

The need to get out, to run, to find his way home gripped Julian for a horrible instant that told him he wasn't yet out of the grasp of his dream. He focused all of his attention — far, far more of his brain that the task actually required — on the lid of his bottle. He unscrewed the threads slowly, letting an attitude meter whirl in his mind's eye, calculating the tilt and motion of the lid as if it were a starship executing a tight spiral ascent. By the time he finally took a drink, he was once more firmly entrenched in the mind of Doctor Julian Bashir, Starfleet Lieutenant, decorated veteran, and Chief Medical Officer. Small, mystified Jules was left behind; again.

Of course, he still wanted to get past that locked door, and he still had every intention of trying to get home. But though the obstacles in this case were objectively far greater than any in the worst of his nightmares of Adigeon Prime, the springboard from which he could tackle them was exponentially more powerful. Despite his dire situation, Julian found himself enormously comforted by that.

He took a drink of water, tilting his head back awkwardly. It cleared his head still further, and he looked thoughtfully at the two men. The others were sleeping, Parvok whistling faintly in the recesses of his sinuses.

"You were talking about me," he said, gazing levelly at Tain. "What's going on?"

"Talking about you?" the Cardassian blustered. "Ridiculous! I'm sure you're used to being the centre of events where you come from, Doctor, but out here we have more pressing concerns."

"Such as?" challenged Julian, unswayed by Tain's protestation. He couldn't make sense of the words, but the feeling was clear: the voices had been talking about him.

"I beg your pardon?" Tain huffed.

"What are your more pressing concerns?" Julian spelled it out carefully. "Perhaps I can be of some assistance."

"If you can, I'll let you know: believe me, Doctor," said Tain. "You owe me more than one favour, you know."

Julian smirked as he lay back down, but his bravado was fading. Tain's words had a sobering effect. He  _did_  owe him more than one favour. He owed him at least four. And men like Enabran Tain did not live so long by forgiving debts.

( _fade_ )


	15. An Eye for Detail

** Part III, Act IV: An Eye for Detail **

Julian ran no risk of oversleeping the following morning. He was in considerable discomfort when the door-panel finally chirped and the lock was released for the day. He wasted no time in hastening to the foul room at the end of the pod. He wasn't the only one in need, and in a less urgent moment he would have been profoundly uncomfortable taking care of his bodily functions in a room with a dozen strangers doing (or waiting to do) the same. As it was, modesty seemed a distant concern. There was no pain in his flank as he emptied his bladder, which was a positive sign. He was no longer perilously dehydrated.

The count was uneventful. Deyos dropped it only twice, at 28 and 56. They finished in record time, and the prisoners dispersed gratefully, moving with more energy than they could usually muster after the long wait at attention. Julian lingered in the atrium, looking thoughtfully down towards the administration corridor where the Vorta had vanished after his rapid inspection. He wondered if he should read anything into the brevity of the morning's ritual abasement. He decided that was dangerous.

The others were back in the barracks when he rejoined them — all except for Enabran Tain. General Martok already had his vest hanging down his back, and he was fiddling with the cord that affixed his sleeve. Julian moved in to take over, and was pleased when the warrior acquiesced without hesitation. Soon he was performing the examination that they were both beginning to find routine.

"How is the joint today?" Martok asked as Julian stretched the arm smoothly. He did not grimace this time, but the doctor's experienced fingers felt the muscles tense when he reached three-quarters extension. "Am I well enough to fight?"

"No you are  _not_  well enough to fight!" Julian scoffed, putting more affront into his tone than he would have done with any patient but a Klingon. "It's been a day and a half. The ligaments need time to regain their integrity, or the first Jem'Hadar to grab you by the wrist is going to dislocate your elbow all over again. And then you'll be unfit for weeks."

"The Jem'Hadar will not wait  _weeks_ ," growled Martok.

"And you think they'll come for you today?" Julian asked, sobered by the prospect.

Martok bared his teeth in disgust. "No," he said. "But if I went out and demanded satisfaction, the First would allow it."

"You're not going to demand anything, not for at least three more days," said Julian. "Even then, I wouldn't advise it."

"Then you advise I sit here, useless as a dotard?" Martok demanded. "I am a Klingon warrior. My only purpose is to defy the enemy."

"You'll be able to defy them for a lot longer if you give your elbow an opportunity to heal," Julian declared. "Three more days. Doctor's orders."

Martok smiled mirthlessly. "I do not know if Ikat'ika will allow me so much time," he said. "His men are restless. They, too, must stave off boredom in this place."

Even three more days would scarcely be enough time for the elbow to heal, especially if another one of the Jem'Hadar tried the manoeuvre that had dislocated it in the first place. But although he might be able to persuade the General to keep his head down until then, Julian knew he would not be able to compel the First to listen. He was powerless to protect his patient from the guards, and that helplessness was more caustic than the fear. He had to fight both, for Martok's sake as well as his own. He continued the exam, keeping his worries to himself.

 _(fade_ )

"It is time to gather for the meal," Kalenna announced pointedly, bringing an end to a long and dreary morning. Once Martok's elbow was checked and rewrapped, Julian had been left with little to do. He had devised a physical therapy regimen for himself as well, but performing the appropriate stretches only took twenty minutes, even with frequent rests to catch his breath and centre himself. His knee ached from the efforts, but it was a healing pain instead of a destructive one, and the inflammation was noticeably reduced.

Julian was glad to get to his feet and start for the door. Martok had gone out about an hour before, restive and irritable. The Breen now opened the door and strode out. Julian was about to fall into step next to Parvok when a thought struck him.

"I think I'll wait," he said. He set his bottles down on the bench nearest the door and put on his most casual expression.

"That would not be wise," Kalenna said. "It is better to be near at hand when the line assembles."

"I'll take my chances today," said Julian pleasantly. "I've been out there early every day since I arrived. I think I'd like to try waiting here this time. It's not like being late for the count, is it? They won't come looking for me."

"No…" The Major's brow furrowed. Julian had the impression she was doing some very quick thinking. "But if you are near the end of the line, you may not draw your full ration."

"I've gone hungry before," said Julian idly, though his stomach churned indignantly at this idea. The half-kilogram of grain and legumes didn't stick to the ribs for long, he was learning, and one meal a day wasn't enough to keep him satiated. "I'll risk it."

Parvok cast an anxious look at Kalenna. She waved him off. "Go, Sub-Lieutenant," she said dismissively. She watched as he departed, and as soon as the door screeched closed behind him, she turned back to Julian.

"I need you to leave the barracks, Doctor," she said, her voice suddenly very low and very urgent.

She had been subtly rushing him out the door every day just before the meal, but subtlety was dead now. He'd noticed the pattern, and he was tired of the feeling that everyone was keeping secrets. " _Why_?" Julian demanded.

She fixed him with a resolute look. "There are things I must attend to before I can eat. The others are courteous enough to allow me the privacy to do them. Will you refuse?"

He gaped at her, momentarily stricken dumb with shame. How could he have been so insensitive? It could not be easy for her, living like this in close quarters with so many men — and most of them aliens. He didn't know the Romulan customs regarding such things, but if the situation were reversed, he knew he'd want a few minutes of the day away from his cellmates.

"I—I—I'm sorry," he mumbled. The nervous stammer that he thought he'd overcome years ago was back, at least in this moment of acute embarrassment. "I'll go at once, of course…"

"Thank you," Kalenna said coolly. Julian was already out the door.

He found the others, loitering just far enough from the place where the line would form to avoid antagonizing the Jem'Hadar. Parvok shot him a reproachful look. Julian didn't meet his eyes. His cheeks were burning. The alarm sounded, and the prisoners began to arrange themselves into the line.

Kalenna appeared at his side moments later, calm and inscrutable as always. She leaned in towards him, nodding at the crook of her arm. "You forgot your bottles, Doctor," she said. There was no note of reproach in her voice.

"Thank you," Julian murmured. "Major, I…"

"There is no need for apologies," she said, and suddenly she was not looking at him, either.

That should have heightened his mortification, but instead it piqued his curiosity. What reason did she have to evade his gaze? He was the one with cause for chagrin, not her.

A suspicious little part of Julian's brain, the part that revelled in a good mystery or a spy story, the part that always seemed to speak with Garak's voice, had an opinion about that.  _Didn't you notice, Doctor? She said the one thing guaranteed to get you out of that barracks without delay. She's been in this prison for almost two years. Do you really think she's too shy to do what she has to do in front of a physician?_

But that didn't make sense. If Kalenna hadn't needed to attend to something personal, why was she so adamant that he had to leave the barracks before her? Especially since whatever she'd done after his departure had not taken more than three or four minutes.

Julian watched the back of Major Kalenna's head as she shuffled forward in the ration line, and he wondered.

 _(fade_ )

Tain materialized for the meal, smiling and making boisterous conversation with very little assistance while the others ate their mush. Leaning against the wall beside the Breen, and hoping that two standing prisoners would draw no more attention from the guards than one, Julian watched the old Cardassian as he ate. There was a sheen of perspiration on his brow, and it trickled between the scales on his neck ridges. Where could he possibly have gone to work up a sweat in this place, where the air was too cold for a human to be comfortable, much less a Cardassian?

It was possible that he was passing his days in another barracks, but if so, which one? And why? He seemed to have nothing but contempt for his fellow Cardassians, and Julian had not observed him interacting with anyone from outside Barracks 6 since his very first day in the camp. Martok seemed to know where he went, or at least he was confident enough that Tain could not be replaced by a Founder while there that he did not demand nightly blood-screenings. And there was last night's strange happenings to consider. Julian could not shake the certainty that their voices had trickled into his dreams, and although he still could not remember any of the words he had heard while in that state of half-remembered debility, he was equally certain they had been talking about him.

Parvok was always willing to get Julian out of the way on some pretext or other, shortly before Tain reappeared out of nowhere. And there was Kalenna's strange behaviour to consider. It all added up to something, but Julian seemed to be missing some vital piece of the puzzle.

He thought back over the last few days. Yesterday and the day before, something had prevented Julian from making a timely return to the barracks after the meal. Two days ago, he had been slow and concussed after his encounter with the butt of a plasma rifle, and yesterday, Martok had taken him on a circuit of the atrium so that they could talk about Tain's motives for startling Julian out of his numb misery. But on the first day he had gone out for ration call, they had all come back to the barracks together. The memory was hazy: Julian had still been overcome with horror and panic at the thought of the Changeling that had replaced him insinuating itself into the O'Brien household. But after he had come back to himself, Tain had been there to needle him into going out for a walk.

It was the only time he'd seen Tain in the barracks or anywhere else during the interval between the daily meal and the start of the Jem'Hadar's contest of strength in the ring. And the only time he had seen the Cardassian in the barracks  _after_  a fight was when General Martok had been the combatant.

As soon as he had wiped his plate with the side of his finger (he was not yet so desperate as to lick it clean), Julian hastened to return it. Tain tried to call him back to sit with the group, but Julian had a hypothesis and he intended to test it. Moving as quickly as his limp allowed, he crossed the atrium and made straight for Barracks 6.

He was the first one there. The others arrived shortly afterward, in staggered intervals: Parvok first, then Kalenna and the Breen. Finally, Tain came in and meandered over to his cot. He lay down without remark, tucking one hand up behind his heavy head. He gazed up at the ceiling with the dreamy expression Julian usually associated with cloud-watching. He said nothing.

Julian waited. He expected the first suggestion that he take a walk to come after ten minutes. It did not. At twenty, the silence in the cell was beginning to seem like a permanent fixture. He approximated that forty minutes had passed when Parvok got up and left the room without a word. He returned five minutes later with freshly sterilized hands and an uneasy look on his face.

Kalenna was calm, and Tain was silent. Time crept on while Julian put himself through another series of his physiotherapy exercises, and no one tried to convince him to leave the room.

The suspicious part of his brain had a theory about that. They were biding their time, knowing he would leave when the Jem'Hadar gathered for the afternoon's match. Then Tain could slip off, and Julian would have to lay his trap some other day. Or he could find a pretext to leave the room now, on his own terms.

"Seems I'm not dehydrated anymore," he said, climbing to his feet with a long-suffering sigh. He looked at Kalenna. "I don't suppose the Jem'Hadar ever bother to clean the floor down there, do they? It's disgusting."

She pursed her lips distastefully. "Not in the time I've been here, no," she said. "I would advise staying up off it if you can."

Julian forced a wry half-laugh as he went for the door. He slapped the panel, waiting the extra few milliseconds that the lagging mechanism took to spring open, and then strode purposefully out into the corridor. With a speed he probably should not have risked in the open, he crossed the hall towards the door to Barracks 2, which was offset just out of the eyeline from Barracks 6. He struck the panel just in time, and the noise of his own cell's door closing covered the noise of this one opening. He slipped inside.

Five startled faces looked up at him: four Cardassians and a man with the distinct bifurcated nasal bridge and brow ridges of the Rakhari. They were gathered on the floor around one of their tables, on which an assortment of pebbles, buttons and plugs of lint were arranged in what looked like some kind of game. Julian held up his hands, palms outward, to show that he was no threat.

"I just need to use your window," he said, as the door shrieked closed behind him.

He didn't pause for permission, nor ask for any assurance that they would not set upon him as soon as his back was turned. He had to hope that the claim Tain had laid upon him would safeguard him from the Cardassians, at least. And the Rakhari was outnumbered. Julian planted his palm on the door for balance, and pressed his cheek to the cold metal so that he could peer out the window towards the barracks he had just left.

He waited, knowing that if Tain did intend to go anywhere, he would be counting off the seconds it would take Julian to get to the waste reclamation room. He counted them off himself, adding an extra thirty seconds in case Tain expected him to move more slowly on his bad leg than he actually was. The door to Barracks 6 did not open. Another fifteen seconds elapsed, and still the door remained closed.

"Get out of here," one of the Cardassians said bitterly. "Haven't you done enough?"

The words stung. So some of the prisoners blamed him for what had happened to his first patient in this hateful place. Julian swallowed hard against the bubble of regret rising in his throat.

"I'll only be another minute," he said tightly. "I just—"

His voice trailed off, the thought unfinished. There was movement behind the door of Barracks 6 after all. Julian could see a head and shoulders slide into the frame of the window. A moment later he saw that it was Parvok. But the door did not open. Instead, the Romulan pressed his own face to the window, much as Julian was doing. He glanced down the corridor towards the waste reclamation room, and Julian had to resist the urge to duck out of sight. There was no reason Parvok should be looking at the windows across the way, but his attention would definitely be drawn by a sudden motion.

The hunch played out. Parvok did not seem to see the watcher in the other barracks: he swept his gaze in the other direction, turning his head so that he could watch the mouth of the corridor where it opened on the atrium. That way lay the greater threat: not the nosy Starfleet officer, but the armed Jem'Hadar. Parvok's lips moved, calling something back into the room, but Julian's angle was not good enough to attempt to read the motions. Instead he waited. If the coast was clear, Tain would be emerging any moment now.

And yet he did not come. Two minutes passed; longer. The door did not open. Julian scarcely blinked, half-expecting that if he did, he would miss the moment when Tain came out. He was just beginning to doubt that the man ever would when a hard hand closed on his shoulders.

" _Get out_!" the Cardassian snarled, whirling him around and slamming his back against the door. "You and your Federation meddling are not wanted here. You'll get us all killed like you did Trel!"

So that was his name. Trel. Julian could not spare the fallen man any further thought now, but he promised himself he would remember his name. He shrugged off the hand that held him, seeing a flicker of surprise on the Cardassian's face as this seemed to take less effort than it should have done.

"I'm going," Julian said forcefully. He reached behind and struck out for the panel. Then he rolled his shoulder out into the corridor, fixing his focus on the door to Barracks 6. It was still closed, and he calculated that he had not looked away long enough to have missed it opening, much less Tain's egress. Discouraged and a trifle embarrassed that he had thought it might possibly be that easy to catch the former head of the Obsidian Order in the act of slipping away, Julian saw no choice but to return to the barracks. It would be time to go out to the arena soon.

The few steps back to the door to his own cell were slower and more painful than those leading away had been. Tiredly, he pressed the panel, cringing inwardly at the noise as the door flew open. He was being ridiculous, wasting his energy on a non-existent puzzle. Julian was just launching into a new self-castigating thought when he crossed the threshold and froze, staring.

Enabran Tain was gone.

 _(fade_ )

He blinked, not quite sure of what he was seeing. The Breen was sitting on their cot, and Kalenna was on hers. Parvok was standing in the corner to the right of the door, boots widely placed and hands behind his back. The cots and the bolted-down tables stood just as they had before. There were canteens tucked under them, and Julian's cache of bandaging materials under the one at the rear left corner. Everything was as he had left it a few minutes before, but Tain was gone.

 _He couldn't have gone anywhere! The door didn't open!_  The stunned thoughts had the urgent note of a startled protest of innocence in the face of a drumhead charge, but other parts of Julian's brain were whirring along more calmly. Lightning quick and oiled to perfection, to be sure, but so very, very calm.

If Tain could not have left the barracks, Tain was still inside the barracks. But where?

A horrifying thought welled up like oozing poison from contaminated ground. Was Tain a Changeling after all? Had he morphed into something — one of the blankets, perhaps, or a water bottle, or the cover of the light fixture? But if Tain had changed shape in front of Parvok and Kalenna, then they were collaborators, and that…

That was ridiculous. Julian remembered the panic in the wake of the Changeling scare on Earth last year. Paranoia spread too easily when you were faced with an enemy capable of taking any shape at all. It became too easy to distrust your friends, your colleagues, and even the walls around you. He refused to give into that kind of all-too-rational-seeming terror.

The walls. He looked for a grate or a service conduit panel, knowing there wasn't one. Why would there be? Who would build a prison, even adapted from an old mining colony, with a warren of passageways out of sight of the guards?

"Where is he?" Julian asked, coming further into the room. The door whined shut, exhausted with the effort of gaping open for him.

"Who?" Parvok tried to sound convincing, but his voice was too high, telling his strain.

"Tain, of course!" snapped Julian. He bent to one side, peering under the beds on the righthand wall. He knew the broad Cardassian frame couldn't possibly be concealed under any of them, but it was only natural to look. "Where did he go?"

"Out," said Kalenna.

"No." Julian's jaw worked around the syllable as he prowled towards the rear of the barracks. He was still sweeping the room with his sharp eyes, looking for something, anything that was out of place. "No, he did not go out. The door didn't open. He can't walk through walls: he's a man, not a ghost. So where did he go?"

Neither of the Romulans answered him. Kalenna was on her feet — somehow he hadn't quite registered that she was standing when he came in. She looked like she wanted to step forward and restrain him with an appeasing hand, but she didn't. Parvok's eyes kept flickering between the predatory human and his superior officer. She held him steady with a slight shake of his head.

"Watch the door," she hissed. "Doctor, if the Jem'Hadar approach, you will have to sit down."

"I don't care about the Jem'Hadar, not right now," Julian spat. He wasn't angry with her, not exactly, but the feeling that the key to this puzzle was within his grasp electrified him with determination and focus such as he had not felt since his bleary awakening four days ago. His eyes seemed to bore into everything they brushed… and then he saw it.

There was a scuff-mark on the floor, between the back right corner of the second bench and the front left corner of Enabran Tain's cot. It was just a little mark, where something had left a fan of oxidized flakes ground into the composite stone: no more than twenty-five millimetres along its outer arc. But there was a mark, and it was at a perfect parabolic angle from the corner of Tain's bunk.

Julian moved to the bedside with a catlike nimbleness that showed no regard at all for his stiff knee, or for the pang of pain that the motion brought. He leaned in, examining the wall behind the cot. It was just like the one next to his own bed: two trapezoidal tritanium panels at the junction of four larger ones, all of them held in place by large, hexagonal rivets.

 _No, NOT just like the one next to your bed, Doctor_! Julian's mind cried out triumphantly in Garak's voice. The rivets on this wall were a millimetre and a half smaller in diameter than the ones next to his bunk.

He hesitated. A millimetre and a half was a minuscule difference, even to his eyes. It could be a trick of the light, or a lingering effect of the blow to the head. But no. He had spent four long, horrible hours yesterday staring at those rivets and trying not to feel. He was absolutely not mistaken as to their size, and he was absolutely not imagining that these ones were smaller.

A glance at the right-hand trapezoid confirmed it: the rivets on the left panel were smaller.

Julian tried to pry the panel from the wall, his fingers digging along its seamed edge. It was useless. Even though his fingernails were now overgrown, two unsanitary millimetres past the quick, they weren't enough to get leverage under the tightly-fitted panel. Even if they had been, he didn't think there was enough strength in his fingers to force the tightly-fitted holes over bolts that looked to have been shaved down  _just_  far enough and no farther.

Then something else snagged in his mind. Yesterday, wanting to tear strips from the spare blanket, he had asked Tain for the knife General Martok had used for the blood-screening. Tain had been perplexed, as if he had forgotten the weapon's existence. And Martok had said…

A grim little smile tugged at Julian's lips, the satisfied smile of a man who has just seen an insoluble mathematic proof fall into place before his eyes. He reached down, not looking away from the panel. He found the edge of Tain's mattress and folded it back. The piece of scrap metal lay flat against the webbing, its bent side curled down in one of the open squares. Julian picked it up, not gripping the side he had taken for a handle before, but the rag-bound cutting edge instead.

 _He means the tool_ , was what Martok had said, and Tain had then immediately understood what Julian wanted. He had not forgotten the weapon under his bed: instead, he had not been thinking of it as a weapon. It wasn't a makeshift dagger kept to test for shape-shifters: that was just a happy coincidence. It was a tool, with a right-angled prying end worn almost to a bevel.

Julian wedged the end under the lip of the tritanium panel, rocking it rapidly to generate momentum. It worked. The tool slid in, flush with the edge of the trapezoid. Then all it took was a quick flick of the wrist to lever the panel off the wall completely.

There was a hole now, thirty-three centimetres across and twenty-six high on the taller side. Julian bent lower, peering in. There was a glimmer of something deep inside the wall, but as he squinted to see what lay within, the light wicked out.

"Keep your eyes on the door, not on him!" Kalenna hissed. Julian heard her take three hesitant steps towards him. "Doctor, if the guards come…"

She was more concerned about the guards than about him, and Julian found that reassuring. He had stumbled upon whatever it was they were all trying to keep from him, but instead of threats and demands that he cease and desist, she was warning him about the Jem'Hadar. She was, in effect, telling him that this secret was his to protect now, too, whatever it turned out to be.

The hole was too small to admit a person, but Julian could get his forearm into it without any difficulty whatsoever. He reached in up to the elbow, and groped around. He felt empty air, hotter than the air in the open rooms, and the sharp lip of a vent. His fingertips brushed something fibrous. It might have been a frayed optronic cable, but it was just out of reach. He reached further, up to the shoulder now with his hip pressed against the wall and his good knee up on Tain's bed. His arm swung down, momentarily weary, and thumped against the larger panel that the trapezoid had held in place.

It bounced away from the support struts, smacking his hip before rebounding back. Julian looked down. The edge of Tain's cot was pressed against it, holding it in place.

He retracted his arm from the wall and got both feet back on the floor. He lifted the cot away from the wall, understanding now where the scratch on the floor had come from. Then he got his arm inside of the wall again and smacked the lower panel from behind. It popped loose again, and he lifted it aside, revealing a crawlspace into the darkness behind the wall.

Julian looked at Kalenna with the obvious question in his eyes. He half-hoped she would simply answer it and save him the exertions ahead, but she didn't. She was watching him with a guarded expression while Parvok kept stealing glances back over his shoulder.

"Keep your eyes on that corridor," Julian instructed. Then he dropped to his hands and his good knee, holding the injured one so it just skimmed the floor, and he crawled inside the wall.

It was a painfully small space, far narrower than the service conduits on Deep Space Nine. Julian's shoulder barked on one corner as he slithered through. Inside the wall, dimly illuminated by the light filtering through the open panel, a columnar space with a square footprint rose into darkness. There was a fissure-like junction on at its back, vanishing into blackness on the right. It was too narrow to admit Julian's shoulders head-on: scarcely more than thirty-five centimetres wide. But he could hear something back there in the darkness: the slow, ponderous breathing of a humanoid.

Julian struggled to his feet, his right leg dragging. Bracing his palms on the walls, he slid in behind the jungle of wires and dead EPS conduits that lay against the barracks wall. He had to move sideways, inching like a crab with his back to the room without and his face to the sloping outer wall of the pod. The darkness deepened as he slid further from the only source of light, and the air was close and heavy with the heat of hidden circuitry. A trickle of perspiration slid behind Julian's ear, and he realized that he was warm for the first time since awakening in this prison.

He was just beginning to believe that he had imagined the sound of breathing, and that he was a madman for even attempting to climb inside a wall, when his nostrils picked up the now very familiar scent of an unwashed Cardassian body, and his lead shoulder collided with something firm but well-padded: a fleshy deltoid.

Julian's head whipped to the right, even though he knew he would see little in the blackness. He caught the glinting reflection in a nictitating eye, however, and he thought he saw a glimmer of teeth as the person whose smothering sanctuary he had invaded grinned.

"Well, Doctor! You've found me!" sang Enabran Tain delightedly. "I think I'd like to call in one of my favours, now."

( _fade_ )


	16. Enabran Tain's Secret

**Part III, Act V: Enabran Tain's Secret**

Wedged between the wall and the tangle of electronic infrastructure, Julian had to press himself uncomfortably backward in order to shift the weight off of his injured knee. In doing so, he inadvertently jostled Tain with his shoulder.

"Budge over a little, there's a good man," the Cardassian chuckled. "It's a rather tight fit back here."

That was no exaggeration, and if Julian felt penned-in, how was Tain — with his larger girth and his barrel chest — managing at all?

"What is this?" he asked, his eyes roaming in the darkness. He could made out the vague shapes of ribbed cables and ventilation tubing, but that was all.

"I should think that's obvious, Doctor. It's the inside of the wall." Tain shifted, doing something with his far hand. There was a flicker in Julian's peripheral vision, and then a slow, dawning glow rose to light Tain in profile. It was a bundle of optronic cable, five thick strands severed crudely in cross-section. They emitted a dim light, but it was warmer in tone than any of the Dominion's utilitarian fixtures outside. Tain tilted his head towards Julian and grinned. "My little sanctuary!"

 _Sanctuary_? It was certainly warmer in here than anywhere else in the compound, which was no doubt a consolation to the Cardassian. And Julian supposed it could be construed as private. But neither of those were a good enough reason to be crammed into this upright coffin of a crevice. His eyes had adjusted to the glow of the improvised lamp, and now he saw what stood in front of Enabran Tain.

It was a circuit housing, the front panels pried off to reveal the chips and wires and junctions beneath. The entire assembly was a nest of chaos, with none of the neat grid arrangement and pristine labels of Starfleet equipment. It lacked even the complex geometric order of Cardassian circuitry. It looked improvised and jury-rigged and assembled of irregular leftover equipment from a dozen worlds. No Engineering Extension Course at Starfleet Academy had prepared Julian to make sense of anything remotely like this. He had a feeling even the redoubtable Chief O'Brien, miracle worker and expert at bridging ostensibly incompatible technologies, would struggle to understand what was going on in here. The nearest comparison Julian could draw to anything in his realm of experience was to the inside of Quark's holosuite generators, where Rom had made years' worth of repairs and adjustments using whatever random components came to hand — including, so Odo said, a spatula.

"What are you doing with  _that_ ," Julian said slowly, eyes travelling with something like wonder over the inscrutable monument to entropy before him.

"Bending it to my will," Tain said smugly. But his smile wavered and a sour look settled in his subtly glazed eyes. He had his inner lids closed, and he was watching the world through the transparent membranes. Julian understood why: the dust in here was smothering. His own eyes were watering. "It's not exactly as pliable as most of my clients have been over the years."

By  _clients_  he meant  _subjects for interrogation_ , and a chill ran up Julian's spine. Suddenly he was all too conscious of just how near he stood to this man who had been the terror of worlds, the unseen hand at the tiller of dread.

"Just tell me what it is," said Julian.

Tain chuckled quietly. "Certainly. But first, you have a decision to make."

Julian swallowed with some effort. As much as he wanted to believe that he did not fear Tain, he knew that he did. How could he not, when even Garak had feared him in his own secret way? He had just forced his way into the hidden den of the man for whom furtiveness was not just a way of life, but practically a faith system. There was no telling what vengeance this man — torturer, assassin, conscienceless powermonger — might exact for such a violation.

"What's that?" Julian croaked.

"Are we going to have the conversation in here, or out there?" said Tain, as if debating the most suitable environs for afternoon tea. "Because if we're going to talk out there, we should go at once. And if we're going to talk in here, the Major needs to close the panel. It's been open too long as it is. Major?" he called, raising his voice only a little. "What's the situation?"

"Secure," Kalenna's voice reported. She, too, was not speaking above a quiet, conversational tone. Her voice carried through the passage, but Julian was quite sure it was coming through the seams in the tritanium plating as well. From in here, even with the entrance closed, it was possible to hear almost anything said in the main room of the barracks.

"That's how you knew what I said to Parvok about the bandages," Julian said, comprehension dawning. "it wasn't the Breen after all."

"The Breen?" Tain snorted in disdainful amusement. "The Breen can't understand a word any of us are saying. It tried to communicate at first, when it arrived here. But none of our translators can make sense of its language — all those clatters and cronks and shrieks. Eventually it gave up."

Julian didn't have the energy to lecture the head of the Obsidian Order on pronoun etiquette for people of nonspecific gender. "That must be very lonely," he said instead.

"Possibly, possibly," Tain allowed. "Are the Breen social creatures? I really don't know."

All creatures were social creatures in one way or another. Even nanites exhibited what might be considered concerted community action. Sometimes it was easy to think that Tain was being deliberately heartless.

"In or out, Doctor? It's all the same to me. I won't get much work done while I'm talking." Tain smirked at him. "And it really is a little too crowded back here with two."

"Out, then, I suppose," sighed Julian. He glanced back over his left shoulder in the direction he had come.

"After you!" Tain said, gleeful at the hilarity of this common phrase in these circumstances.

Inching out of the fissure was easier than inching in had been, probably because Julian was able to lead with his good leg. Getting down onto his hands and knees in the narrow crawlspace was harder, and Julian had to bite his lip against the pain of the contortion, but then he was crawling out into the open again, twisting his shoulders so they could navigate the exit. He didn't pause to struggle to his feet: he needed to clear the way for Tain. So he scuttled on hands and knees to the middle of the room and sat back with his shoulder-blades braced on the rim of the nearest bench. He closed his eyes as he stretched his right leg and eased it into a tolerable position.

Parvok and Kalenna were helping Tain to his feet. He rose with the stiff, ponderous movements of a heavy man whose joints were showing the wear of his advancing years, but though his breathing was laboured he grinned as he stood, and dusted the front of his suit with satisfaction.

The two Romulans stepped around him, and hurriedly replaced the wall panels. The large one went into place first, then the trapezoid. Then the cot was shifted back to where it belonged. Last of all, Kalenna hid the prying tool under the mattress and squared off the blanket folded across the foot.

"Now, then," said Tain, strolling to the other table and straddling one corner so that he could look down at Julian, gathering his wits on the floor. "I suppose you have questions."

"Go fetch the General," Kalenna said hurriedly to her subordinate. To Tain, she said; "We should all be here for this. Better if we all have our say at once: there will be less chance of being overheard in a single conference."

"Whatever you like," Tain said airily, but Julian caught the look of calculating agreement in the Cardassian's eyes. "But are we going to do this right now, Doctor? They'll be gathering to fight, soon: are you going to abandon us for more of your Federation altruism?"

Julian glanced at the door, uncomfortable with this question. He was burning with the need to know what was going on: he felt like his continued ignorance might drive him mad. But he had a duty as a physician to render aid where it was needed.

On the other hand, he could do nothing at all until the Jem'Hadar First declared the afternoon's contest of cruelty at an end. He didn't accomplish anything by watching the fight itself.

"I have until the match is over," he said. "It might be a quick one, it might not."

"I heard them talking," murmured Kalenna. "They're taking one of the Hunters today, the one who arrived last week. It won't be quick."

Julian's only experience with the Hunters, a Gamma Quadrant people whose culture revolved around a blood-sport in which another sentient species was pursued to the death, had been in his first months on Deep Space Nine. He hadn't been involved in their sudden invasion or their pursuit of Tosk throughout the station, but from his colleagues he knew how ruthlessly efficient the Hunters were. They had a code of honour, too, different from the Klingons' but just as binding. He imagined a Hunter would put up a fierce and skillful defence.

The door banged open, and Martok strode in. Parvok was on his heels, skittish and uncomfortable.

"What do you want, Tain?" the General demanded, exasperation seething in his words. "Your errand-boy would not say!"

Tain waited until the door was closed again, looking back over his shoulder at the irritated Klingon and swinging one foot idly. "The good Doctor," he said at last, conversationally; "has discovered our secret!"

Martok's expression shifted from annoyance to surprise to grim satisfaction. He nodded at Julian approvingly. "I hoped you would work it out quickly," he rumbled. "You Starfleet officers — your curiosity is legendary. I knew it was only a matter of time."

"And you were right!" sang Tain. He leaned conspiratorially onto one elbow. "I confess, Doctor, I thought you'd be a good deal slower on the uptake. Distracted, you see, by all your various trials."

"Challenges, Tain," Julian corrected, feeling his grin sprouting right from his heart. He had bested the spymaster, and he was going to enjoy it. It felt good to sweep away the wretchedness of the last few days with a little bravado, too. "They're only challenges."

Tain laughed boisterously. "That's the spirit! All right, now: you've earned a few answers. Ask your questions."

Julian paused, uncertain whether to take this offer at face value. But he glanced up at Martok, standing by Tain's shoulder, and then over at Kalenna, who was perched on the edge of the nearest cot. He thought he could rely on them to make sure he got something like the truth. The Major's earlier misleading words aside, she hadn't really lied to him. She had indeed needed privacy to do something before she could eat: she had needed to let Tain out of the wall. And Klingons abhorred deception, even if they were masters of the art of obstreperous evasion. Martok would not countenance a lie.

"What's inside that circuit housing you're working on in there?" he began.

"It used to be a life support unit," said Tain, with the idle note of a storyteller embarking on a well-loved yarn. "In the days before the dome was built, every barracks had its own closed environment. It was the General, here, who gleaned that piece of useful information for us."

"My first cellmate was a Dosi trader," said Martok. "Like me, he had been drugged and brought here by stealth. Now I understand that he must have been replaced on his world, as you and I were, Doctor. He knew much of the history of this system."

"What happened to him?" Julian asked quietly, not wanting the answer but compelled to wonder just the same.

"He died of some kind of sickness," Martok muttered, his eye very far away for a moment. "He could not breathe, and his legs swelled grotesquely. In the night, he would pant and choke. His eyes would twitch from side to side. At the end, he could keep nothing down, not even water. His heart stopped."

That sounded unsettlingly like beriberi to Julian — it wasn't possible, of course, with the daily meal fortified so obviously with thiamine, but that didn't mean that it wasn't missing some other essential nutrient that performed a similar function in the Dosi. And if the Dominion prison diet was inadequate to meet the nutritional needs of one species, none of them could be sure it would meet their own. He was going to have to start watching his fellow prisoners for signs of malnutrition.

"A sad story," Tain allowed; "but he did impart some useful information before he died. Once the General told me there was a life support system behind one of the walls, all we had to do was find some way to get to it."

"It was not easy," growled Martok. "We needed a way to shave down the bolts, and tritanium is resistant to physical wear."

Their tool wasn't hard enough to shape tritanium: that much Julian knew. It had the heft and density of some kind of steel alloy. "What did you use?"

Tain chuckled ruefully. "General Martok is a resourceful man — not a very common trait in Klingons. He stole a laser scalpel from the Vorta doctor who repaired his eye socket."

Julian stiffened at this information, suddenly alert. A laser scalpel was not at the top of his list of coveted devices — he would have asked first for an autosuture or a dermal regenerator or an osteogenic stimulator — but the idea of getting his hands on any medical equipment at all was galvanizing.

"A laser scalpel? Where is it?" he demanded.

Tain leaned down and patted his arm. "We weren't allowed to  _keep_ it, Doctor. The General slipped it to our Romulan friend when she managed to wheedle her way in to visit him at his bedside. You see, her reputation for motherliness has served her well. We spent a sleepless night modifying the rivets, and she got it back to him the following morning. When they searched him before sending him back to us, the Jem'Hadar found it. He passed it off as an attempt to steal a weapon. Clever bit of work."

He nodded approvingly up at Martok, who cast his gaze uncomfortably away. Julian found himself amazed by their ingenuity, and curious as to how Kalenna herself had managed to lull the guards into such a state of complacency that they hadn't seen fit to search  _her_  both coming and going.

"I don't imagine the Jem'Hadar were very pleased to catch you trying to steal it," Julian said, watching Martok's face in concern. The penalty for slouching during the count was brutal enough. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what Deyos would do with a thief.

"They were not," Martok hissed, but he said nothing more. In that moment, the ancestral kinship he shared with Commander Worf was impossible to miss.

"Where did you get the prying tool?" asked Julian.

"That was our dear Major, again," said Tain. He beamed proudly at Kalenna. "She climbed the ore conveyor and got into the service conduits behind it. I believe it was once part of a ladder."

Kalenna nodded once at this and Julian, who had surmised that much as soon as he had the thing in his hands, tilted his chin in acknowledgment.

"How did you know which wall to open?" he asked, curious about this point. From inside the barracks, it looked like a fifty-fifty proposition.

"That was luck," said Tain. "I don't think we would have had the time to remove panels on the other side, too." He looked thoughtful. "Do you know, when I was at the height of my power, I didn't believe in luck."

"It was not luck; it was destiny!" Martok declaimed, gesturing broadly. "We are not meant to die in this place, none of us are!"

"And how is a defunct life support system supposed to guarantee that?" Julian asked. He didn't want to sound cynical. He knew the importance of clinging to hope, and it was plain that this plan, whatever it was, gave General Martok hope. But he was perplexed.

"Tain is converting it into a transmitter," hissed Martok with relish. "He assures us it can be done. He has been at it for months…" He looked questioningly at Tain. "There has been considerable progress?" It wasn't a statement.

"Oh, yes," said Tain, cheerfully lackadaisical. He was trying to make it sound as if all this were of little consequence, but Julian saw the way that his left hand was suddenly twisting the knee of his trouser. "It's proved a stickier problem than I had anticipated, but rest assured it is  _going_  to work."

Converting a life support unit into a subspace transmitter sounded improbable. When Julian thought about the jumble of mismatched circuitry he had seen inside the wall, it seemed downright impossible. But he wasn't about to raise any objections. "You're going to send a distress call," he breathed. "But the Dominion will intercept it, won't they?"

"They might intercept it, but they won't be able to understand it," Tain said smugly. "Not once I'm done encrypting the message. It will just sound like gibberish to them, and to anyone else who comes across it. Subspace trash, years old and garbled beyond recognition. The Dominion, Starfleet, even the Cardassian High Command: none of them will be able to make sense of it!"

Julian felt suddenly weary. "What good is a distress call if no one can make sense of it?" he asked.

"I didn't say  _no one_ ," said Enabran Tain. "And what good is a distress call if it  _looks_  like a distress call? We're not onboard a stranded starship that got waylaid in a plasma storm, Doctor. We're in a Dominion prison camp! If just anyone at all can recognize the message for what it is, we'll be found out. And I don't think I need to tell you what will happen then. No, I'll be sending a message that only one person in the Galaxy has the means to decode. I intend to send it to Garak."

 _(fade_ )

"Garak." The sound of his friend's name fell flat, breaking the silence that Julian had allowed to elapse after Tain's pronouncement. He had been too busy thinking to speak, and the others seemed to be waiting on his words. Julian shook his head slowly.

"Come, now, Doctor, you can hardly find that surprising," clucked Tain. "Garak and I were very close, once upon a time, you know."

The human phrase was disarming. Julian frowned up at the Cardassian. "And what?" he asked. "You've got some kind of private code between the two of you, something only he would recognize?"

"Is that really so difficult to believe?" asked Tain. "Funny. I would have taken you for the kind of little boy who delighted in dreaming up codes and secret messages with his friends. Surely you can't be astonished that real intelligence operatives have similar hobbies!"

Julian gave him a thin little frown of exasperation. The truth was that he might indeed have been such a boy, if he'd ever been able to keep a friend for more than a few months. His father's unreliable employment prospects and the need to constantly move on to the next big opportunity that never seemed to materialize had meant that Julian was always the new boy in the classroom. Worse, he had always been the new star pupil, eclipsing the accomplishments of his classmates and alienating the other children. He hadn't known then that it was better to hold himself back just a little bit. How could he have known, when he was unwittingly living a lie?

"And what happens when Garak receives this message?" he asked, forcing himself to focus on the problem at hand. "You think he'll come and rescue you?"

"Of course he will!" declared Tain, thumping his fist on his knee. "He'll have no choice. I know Garak, Doctor. Once he knows I'm alive, he'll come for me." He looked suddenly thoughtful, studying Julian from head to toe and back again. "I admit, I expected he'd enlist  _your_  help in the rescue, but I suppose he'll have to find another way."

 _Or he'll take his plan to the Changeling that replaced me, and get himself killed_ , Julian thought darkly. He knew better than to say it. He refused to be the one to steal the hope from his fellow prisoners. And a part of him was convinced that Tain was right. If Garak set his mind to do a thing, he'd do it. It would take more than a Changeling imposter to stop him. And besides, Garak had never really seemed to trust his friend the doctor. Julian couldn't be sure that his replacement would be the tailor's first resource.

He wasn't sure if that thought was comforting, or hurtful.

"How far along are you with the conversion?" Julian asked. He looked up at Martok. "You said he's been working on it for months?"

"Every day," Martok agreed. "Inside the wall, four hours between the count and the meal, ten hours or more after, sometimes without rest. I have never seen such dedication to a task."

If Tain had heard the words of praise, he did not respond. He seemed to be doing some kind of calculation, ticking off fingers in an apparently random order.

"I need to complete the subroutine recoding," he said. "I'm through the worst of it now: shouldn't take more than two weeks. Then there's the message itself. I don't have a control panel to input commands, so each character of the transmission is going to need to be hard-wired into the unit itself… say another week for that, if I'm able to keep up my current pace. Yes, three weeks. That's about right."

Julian's heart sank. Three weeks? He did not doubt his ability to endure these conditions for that long, not if there was truly hope of rescue. But three weeks was a long time to evade the malice of the Vorta, and to keep Martok in one piece despite the attentions of the Jem'Hadar. And the damage that a Founder could do on Deep Space Nine in that amount of time was horrifying.

He covered his mouth with both hands, trying to control his breathing. Leaning back against the bench helped a little, and Julian tilted his head until he was staring up at the austere slate of the ceiling. He drew his hands down, scrubbing at his face against the sandpaper roughness of his stubble.

A strong hand closed on his shoulder, gripping bracingly and rocking his whole body. "Take heart, Doctor!" Martok urged. "This is good news, not bad! He is almost finished his work, and you have arrived just in time to witness it! Be grateful that you were not taken six months ago, when it seemed an impossible task."

Julian let his hands drop into his lap and straightened his head, making an effort to nod as if he had been convinced. Martok was right: he should be grateful. It was an improbable plot, but any hope of rescue at all was infinitely better than none.

"You said you wanted to call in one of your favours, Tain," he said at last, when he was confident he would be able to keep his voice steady. "How can I help?"

"You can keep the secret, for one thing," said Tain. "Though I might point out that it's in your own best interests to do so. There are… other things, Doctor, that you and I can discuss at some more opportune time. But for now, tell me: just how much do you know about Starfleet's subspace communications relay on this side of the Wormhole?"

Julian ran his tongue along his teeth, regretting the gesture as he felt the grit of the anaerobic film now coating them. The information that Tain was asking for was highly classified, of course. The subspace relay and the listening posts that fed it were Starfleet's eyes and ears in the Gamma Quadrant. For a moment, he was surprised that the Cardassian even knew of the array — but of course, it had been deployed weeks before the loss of the joint fleet and the capture of Tain and Kalenna. He wouldn't know anything about the listening posts, though, would he?

"Well?" asked Tain. "If it's loyalty to your colleagues that's stoping you, Doctor, may I remind you that they've got a Founder in their midst right at this moment? It's your solemn duty to warn them about the infiltrator as soon as you're able, and I promise we can expect rescue  _much_  more quickly if we can figure out some way to prioritize the message."

He was right. Julian's first duty  _was_  to warn Captain Sisko about the spy. That came before his duty as a prisoner of war, to attempt escape. It might even come before his duty as a physician, if you considered the potential for loss of life if the Changeling went too long undetected. But he also had a duty to Starfleet Intelligence to protect classified information from historically hostile foreign powers. While Tain was trapped here, he could do nothing with Julian's knowledge but try to engineer their rescue. Once he was back among his own people, however, who could say?

And there was still a chance that the infiltrator would be found out. It wasn't an easy thing to just slip into a human life and take it over. Julian had friends who knew him and expected him to behave in certain ways. His relationship with Jadzia, with their unique dance of teasing and courtesy, mutual respect and playful not-quite-flirtation, wasn't something you could just replicate. The way he and Miles jibed at one another wasn't something that wound up in a duty log. The way he interacted with his patients, with the nurses and assistants who worked with him every day, with his colleagues at Starfleet Medical — all of that was unique to him, to Julian Bashir… wasn't it?

It was premature to give up hope that the Dominion's subterfuge would collapse on its own, and in the meantime Julian had to do what he could to minimize the dissemination of classified information. The access codes were going to have to remain his secret. At least there was no reason not to share the coordinates.

"I can help you prioritize the message," he said, his tone now grave and brisk. It was the voice of an officer proposing a new course of action. "There are certain frequencies that the array is more sensitive to, as well, if there's a concern about the strength of the signal output."

Tain nodded ruefully. "It's a life support system. It's designed to regulated the temperature of the room and the concentration of inert gases in the air. Of course there's a concern about the strength of the signal output."

He didn't need to try to make Julian feel foolish: he'd agreed to help, hadn't he? Rather than let his irritation show, he went on; "I can give you the coordinates of our listening posts in relation to the Wormhole, as well."

"Listening  _posts_ ," said Kalenna, emphasizing the plural.

Julian nodded. "We've… been busy over the last couple of years. The most remote ones are right on the edge of Dominion space. Of course, if we don't know exactly where  _we_  are, that complicates matters."

"Not imponderably," said Tain with a dismissive flick of his hand. "Coordinates will be very helpful, thank you, Doctor."

Julian nodded, shifting his position on the floor. It was beginning to feel very hard beneath his tailbone, but he wasn't quite prepared for the acrobatics to get up off of it. As it turned out, he didn't have the luxury of avoiding that any longer.

"They're finished!" Parvok said sharply, glancing back from his post at the window.

"Already?" Kalenna asked, perplexed.

Tain grunted curiously. "Seems the Hunter didn't put up quite as much of a fight as you expected, Major," he mused.

Julian was struggling inelegantly to get his good leg under him. He had done his right one some mischief crawling out of the wall, and it was stiff and resistant. "Give me a hand," he said without thinking, reaching for Tain's arm.

Either the Cardassian was in a giving mood, or he was simply too surprised by the request to muster argument or mockery. He let Julian grip his hand and provided resistance while the doctor pulled himself to his feet. He took a limping hop towards his cot, sweeping down to grab the rolls of bandages. His knee ached sharply with every step, but the worst of the stiffness abated quickly and he was moving steadily by the time he reached the door.

The Jem'Hadar were indeed finished: most of them had already dispersed by the time Julian reached the edge of the arena. First Ikat'ika and the Sixth were standing on the other side of the ring. In its centre lay the Hunter in his padded red flight suit. It looked strange with all the electronic trappings stripped away — confiscated, no doubt, like Julian's combadge. But more unnatural than the garments was the angle of the man's neck. Julian felt his stomach clench. He didn't need to get any nearer to make his diagnosis, though he still knew he would lower himself painfully to the floor so that he could take a pulse. Not because it was necessary, but because it was the right thing to do: one final courtesy for the fallen, to be declared dead by a doctor.

"His neck is broken," he said softly, unaware that he meant to speak until he heard his own voice.

"Yes," Ikat'ika said, in the rigid, emotionless voice of his kind. "The Second was too enthusiastic. A regrettable waste of a worthy opponent."

It was a sickening and senseless waste of a man's life, but Julian knew better than to expect sorrow from a Jem'Hadar. He took the unsteady step over the lip of the arena, and started forward. Ikat'ika held up his hand, palm outward in a staying gesture.

"Why do you approach? You can see that he is dead." There was genuine puzzlement in his voice.

"He's not dead until a doctor declares him dead," Julian said stiffly. He was determined to carry out this ritual, whatever it cost him. He had been denied the chance to provide it to his other patient: the Cardassian had died unattended, and he had no way of knowing what the guards had done with his body.  _His name was Trel_ , Julian reminded himself.

"That is a faulty argument," said the First. "If he is dead, he is dead. Your opinion on the matter is irrelevant."

"It's my custom," said Julian stubbornly, taking another step forward. He was trying to decide the best way to get down on his knees. He didn't want the Jem'Hadar to see what a struggle it would be. "My Order of Things."

He had hoped these word might help the First understand, as he had almost been able to make Goran'agar understand. But Ikat'ika dropped the hand outheld as a warning, and raised the other instead, crooking a commanding finger at the Sixth by his side. The plasma rifle shifted and fired.

Julian tensed in that instant, expecting to be shot. Instead, the body of the Hunter disintegrated in a bolt of white light. A choked cry of dismay broke from Julian's lips. Part of him understood that it did not matter what happened to the corpse: the Hunter had been dead already, and this did not make him  _more_  dead. But this casual destruction of his remains, without any regard for the life he had lived or the customs of his people, was a new kind of barbarism.

"He was fortunate, human," the First said as he turned away from Julian, waving off the Sixth dismissively. "He, at least, has escaped."

Julian stared numbly at the place where the body had been. Nothing remained, not even scorch-marks in the dust.

 _(fade to black_ )


	17. Teaser: A Holy Night

**Part IV, Teaser: A Holy Night**

The revels in Quark's Bar were still going strong when Major Kira Nerys was finally able to return to the Promenade. She stepped off the turbolift and stood still for a moment or two in the midst of the broad thoroughfare, almost empty at this hour of the night. She planted both hands in the small of her back and leaned back into them, stretching her spine and feeling the slow sway of her heavy belly as if it were again new and unfamiliar. She had moments like that, when her pregnancy caught her off-guard and she was struck by the wonder and perplexity at these transformations to a body that had been a constant and reliable (and largely unchanging) companion for years

She wondered if women who got pregnant in the ordinary way — by making love and conceiving a child who grew in one womb from a single cell — ever experienced that sensation. It was simultaneously unnerving and magical. She'd had her doubts about all of this in the beginning, but now, she wouldn't have traded places with any woman in the Quadrant. To be able to give this gift to a new young life was a blessing from the Prophets.

Unfortunately, it also meant that she couldn't simply help herself to her usual headache remedy, and after an evening of escorting the indomitable and overbearing Kai around the station, Nerys needed  _some_  kind of relief.

The din from Quark's was beginning to pound in her brain, and it was a relief to step out of the echoing sweep of the Promenade into the quiet of the Infirmary. The vestibule was empty and pristine, gleaming surfaces and a warm carpet softening the lines of the Cardassian architecture. Around the first corner, Doctor Bashir's desk and his meticulously catalogued dispensary ushered patients deeper in to the haven of healing. Nerys followed the flow of the room now, remembering the first time she had marched through this space.

It had been very different then, dark and ruinous, the light fixtures strobing peripatetically and a strong stink of spilled drugs and bodily fluids on the air. She had stepped through a minefield of conduit cables and broken glass, detritus of the Cardassians' abrupt withdrawal and the looting that had followed. In her wake, the young and stammering Starfleet Lieutenant she had been tasked with showing to his new place of employment had not stared in horror at the mess as she had expected. Instead, he had been positively buoyant with excitement, striding across the ruined room as if he owned it already. He had eulogized about the adventure he foresaw for himself — frontier medicine, out here where heroes were made! And she had thought him an arrogant, condescending Federation buffoon, disdainful of her people, ignorant of the suffering they had endured, and puffed up with his delusions of grandeur.

Now, almost five years later, she knew better. Doctor Julian Bashir had transformed this space, erasing from it all memory not just of the derelict shell he had inherited, but of what it had been before the Cardassian withdrawal. During the Occupation, the Infirmary had been a gallery of horrors, a place with a brutal double standard of care, where nothing was denied the Cardassian overlords, and the barest of treatment was too good for the Bajoran slaves who had built this station and kept its ore processing unit running twenty-six hours a day. It had been a place where a Bajoran came only as a desperate last resort, because as humiliating as it was to be treated like a beast of burden under the hands of an indifferent veterinarian, the other possibilities awaiting you in these rooms had been so much infinitely worse.

Now it was a warm and welcoming place, scented only faintly with disinfectant and the occasional lingering whiff of Tarkalean tea — one of Bashir's particular favourites. The exam rooms were private, the biobeds were soft, and the medical staff was always ready to greet patients with a smile and a kind word. Far from being a place to avoid, the Infirmary was now a destination for Bajorans in need of specialized care, many of whom made the three-hour shuttle journey from the planet just to seek out Doctor Bashir's expertise and cheerful bedside manner. He had worked a miracle here, one that Nerys found far more remarkable than any that he worked on the bodies of his patients. He had made a hell into a home.

She had been wrong about him, and she'd had plenty of opportunities to reflect on that over the course of her rigorous regimen of checkups since the transplant of the O'Brien's baby from Keiko's womb to hers. She had thought Julian arrogant, when he had only been naïve. She had thought him delusional, when he had been a man of vision. She had thought him frivolous, when in truth he was one of the best people to have at your back in a sticky situation. She had thought him her burden, when in truth he was her friend.

"Hello? Anybody here?" she called. She was well past the dispensary now, moving towards the patient rooms. The hour was late, but the Infirmary was staffed around the clock. One of the things Doctor Bashir had insisted upon right from the first was that his team be comprised chiefly of Bajoran professionals, and Kira was expecting to see one of her own people emerge from the back at her summons.

Instead, it was Julian himself, striding out of the triage room with a rack of vials in one hand and a PADD in the other. He paused for a brief heartbeat, looking her over in quick appraisal, and he smiled warmly. Once, she had hated that smile. Then, she'd learned to endure it. Tonight, it was a welcome coda to a tiresome day.

"Major!" he said cheerfully. "Good evening — or should I say 'good moring'? It's awfully late. Your prenatal appointment isn't until 1600 hours, you know."

"I know." She pursed her lips ruefully, stepping aside to let him pass. He went to his desk, setting down his burdens deftly. He rubbed his hands together as he straightened and turned back to face her.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, brows furrowing in gentle concern. "If it's about the Captain—"

"No! No…" Nerys shook her head. She had indeed been worried about Captain Sisko after he had fallen prey to one of Quark's malfunctioning holosuites the other day, but their encounter this morning had put her mind at ease. The Prophets were at work in the heart of the Emissary. Where others saw erratic behaviour — brushing off Kai Winn and then slipping away to visit the surface when Deep Space Nine was about to be overrun with dignitaries from every corner of the Federation, for instance — Kira saw sacred inspiration and a mysterious drive to pursue some unknown but holy end.

"I've got a headache," she admitted at last, with a heavy little sigh that made her belly ripple. Inside her, the O'Briens' son stirred. She spread her palm over her stomach, sending soothing thoughts to him. "I didn't want to take anything without consulting you first."

Julian frowned a little, perplexedly. It was his "diagnostic puzzle" face, another one that had annoyed Nerys in the early days. Back then, she had practically mined for excuses to be annoyed by him. How things changed…

"A headache?" he repeated. "Can you show me where?"

"Right in front," she said, gesturing across her brow with finger and thumb. Exasperation with her now mercurial body and with the domineering woman who was the cause of her current ailment filtered through in her words and in the curl of her lip. "It's just the stress."

Bashir drew nearer, leaning in to look at her eyes. He put a hand to her brow, gauging her temperature. His palm felt heavier than usual, somehow, or perhaps the gesture was only a little more emphatic. "Stress?" he echoed, puzzled. "Over Federation membership? I'd have thought that was good news for Bajor."

"Oh, it is!" Nerys said hurriedly. Just this morning, she had explained to Dax and Worf her change of heart on this once-contentious issue. Like her change of heart about Julian, it had been a slow process of growth and enlightenment. She shrugged a little sheepishly. "Kai Winn is on the station."

Julian tilted his head back knowingly. "Ooh, I  _see_!" he breathed. "Well, then, yes! By all means, let's get you something for that headache!"

He didn't go to the dispensary shelves as she had expected, but to an instrument tray in the far corner. He returned with a hypospray, loading its base with a slender canister of medication. He started for her shoulder, his thumb primed to activate the device. Kira took a step back.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Hydrocortilene, three percent," Bashir said. "Standard treatment for a headache." He grinned. "It's quite safe for the baby, if that's what's worrying you."

Nerys knew he would never give her anything that might endanger the baby, but the cavalier way he had gone for the hypo made her uneasy. "Don't you have anything more natural?" she asked.

He looked at her quizzically. " _Natural_?"

It was the third time he'd responded by parroting her. While it was a habit of his, he didn't usually indulge in it so many times in a single conversation. Kira's brows knit together at the first of her nasal ridges.

"Is there something on your mind tonight, Julian?" she asked, making the rare gesture of using his given name. "You seem distracted."

"What?" he hiccuped, giving lie to his next words. "Oh, no, nothing at all." He seemed to hear the absurdity in this, because he shrugged sheepishly. "It's been a busy couple of days," he admitted.

"You're not worried about him, are you?" Nerys asked hesitantly. She probably wouldn't have asked such a question even a year ago, not of Julian, but she had learned he could be relied upon to keep his own counsel. "The Emissary— the Captain… he said you told him the neural shock would go away on its own."

"And it will!" he assured her, emphatically. "He's going to be  _fine,_  Nerys. Though he was supposed to stop in for a quick looking-over this evening… hmm. Must've forgotten."

"Ah…" She looked around awkwardly, a little reluctant to explain. Bashir was a man of science, not a man of faith. He wouldn't understand. "He's not on the station at the moment. He went down to Bajor this afternoon. With Captain Yates."

"Why would he do a thing like that?" asked Julian, still fingering the hypospray as if he itched to use it. "With all the preparations for Bajor's induction into the Federation, I'd have thought he'd be too busy for a field trip."

"Hence why Kai Winn is  _my_  problem," Kira said sunnily, throwing up her hands to show him that it was inexplicable but it couldn't be helped.

"Well, let me get you something," he said, shambling away to return the hypospray to its place amid the other instruments. "Something more  _natural_ , you said. Like what?"

"Like a root or a herb or a…" Kira let her voice trail off, frowning at Julian's back as he surveyed the dispensary shelves. Throughout her pregnancy, he had gone to great lengths to source time-honoured Bajoran botanical remedies for her various (apparently unending parade of) symptoms. He had great respect for traditional medicine — another thing she wouldn't have expected of the brash young man he'd been — and used his skill and his modern medical knowledge to adapt and explore strategies that Bajoran healers had honed over tens of thousands of years. Why was he suddenly so perplexed by her request for a natural analgesic?

"Let me see…" Bashir abandoned his apparently aimless examination of the various vials and canisters, and leaned in over his computer terminal. "Bajoran folk cures, headache, pregnant woman…"

He was using the computer as deftly as always, but the fact that he'd felt the need to consult it at all surprised her. Nerys knew he had done vast quantities of research in support of a pregnancy that, as far as either of them could tell, was a medical first. Temporary fetal transplants were a routine strategy in cases of traumatic injury to the biological mother, but transplanting a human baby into a Bajoran womb and expecting the surrogate mother to carry him to term was unprecedented. Julian did a good job of hiding his enthusiasm for this trailblazing case, knowing that Kira hated to feel like a laboratory rodent under scrutiny. But the enthusiasm was there, all right, and it manifested itself in a need to bury himself in reading material.

"Here we are! Anarin root," Julian said triumphantly. He switched screens, lively eyes darting as he cross-referenced something. "Oh! Looks like I gave you some eight weeks ago, when you pulled that double shift to overhaul the  _Defiant's_ duty roster." He went back to the shelves and found the appropriate container almost without looking.

Nerys had forgotten about that, but she was mildly surprised that Bashir had. He usually exhibited a comprehensive recollection of his patients' treatment history, dredging up tidbits from three or four years ago as casually as he could cite vitals taken five minutes before. It was a remarkable talent, even a little uncanny, so why had this detail slipped his mind?

She wanted to laugh at herself. That was ridiculous. She was questioning his behaviour because he  _wasn't_  showing evidence of an unsettlingly perfect memory? It was after midnight, and they had all had a tumultuous couple of days. It wasn't that long ago, either, that he'd been rousted from bed at 0300 hours to tend to Captain Sisko's emergency.

"Here you are," Julian said cheerfully, holding up a little laboratory dish with a heap of fine purplish shavings resting in its centre.

Kira remembered the remedy now, and she was relieved: this one didn't taste nearly as bad as some of the others. She had a feeling she'd be belching up the foul odour of makara herbs until her eightieth birthday.

"Thanks," she said. "Mixed with something hot, right?"

"You can take them right now, if you like," Bashir invited. He moved over to the replicator. "Two Tarkalean teas, hot, one extra sweet, one half sweet with a spoon."

Two glass mugs appeared, and he brought them over, offering her the one with the utensil. Nerys emptied the contents of the little dish into her cup and stirred vigorously. The doctor held his vessel up in salute. "Cheers," he said warmly.

She clinked the rim of her glass against his indulgently, nodding to show she appreciated the human custom. Then she took a cautious sip. The tea was perfect: just the right temperature, not too cloying. She didn't know how Julian stood the strong floral bouquet of the Tarkalean honey, or the way the overwhelming sweetness shrivelled the tastebuds. Maybe human tongues didn't do that? She took a longer draught of her drink, eager to set the anarin working as quickly as possible.

Her combadge crackled to life. "Ops to Major Kira," a crisp, Starfleet voice said.

Kira shifted her mug to the other hand and tapped the Militia insignia in the hollow of her shoulder. "Kira here. Go ahead, Ops."

"We have a subspace transmission from Bajor for you, Major," the night watch communications officer said. "It's Captain Sisko."

Kira stiffened, eyes widening a little in concern. Why would the Captain be calling her from Bajor in the dead of night? She wasn't sure which time zone he'd been destined for when he left this afternoon, but he had certainly put in a full day awake and alert. She looked questioningly at Bashir.

"Doctor…" she began.

He gestured to his desk. "Oh, by all means, Major," he said with a gallant little nod. Blowing thoughtfully at his tea, he strolled casually back into the triage room to give her some privacy.

"Ops, patch it through to the Infirmary. Doctor Bashir's terminal," she instructed.

"Acknowledged, Major. Ops out," the disembodied voice said.

Ordinarily, Kira would have loomed over the screen, braced with both hands, authoritative. Now, however, she felt three thousand weeks pregnant, and her ankles were swollen despite the excellent insoles Garak had provided for her duty boots, and she thought it would be wise to sit down. She raked up Bashir's chair so that she was squarely positioned as the display whirled, buffering quickly. A moment later, Captain Sisko's familiar face appeared on the screen.

The resolution was a little grainy: he was using a handheld unit. Behind him was a dark rock wall. But what Nerys noticed was his expression. He looked like a figure in an ancient icon, his dark skin smooth and almost pearlescent, the muscles beneath at perfect rest. He looked sombre and serene… and rapturous.

"Captain!" she said, leaning in. "What is it? What's happened?"

When he spoke, it was with the same dreamlike quality with which he had shared the substance of his  _pagh'tem'far_  that morning — had it only been that morning? She had been honoured and humbled to be with him in the moment of his sacred vision. She felt that same stirring of ecstasy now.

"I found it, Major," he said, his voice deep and melodious and otherworldly. It was the most beautiful sound Nerys had ever heard. "I found B'hala. I  _found_  the Holy City."

The breath that escaped Kira's parted lips was an exhalation of wonder and joy that she could never have expressed with words. Her heart thundered within her as she looked into the eyes of the Emissary. She could feel the love of the Prophets flowing around her like an eddying rose-coloured cloud.

All thoughts of Doctor Bashir, of her headache, of the Kai, even of Bajor's upcoming induction into the Federation faded from her mind. The Emissary of the Prophets had found the sacred city of B'hala, lost for twenty thousand years. It was a holy night.

( _fade to theme_ )


	18. The Agitator

**Part IV, Act I: The Agitator**

The next day, Deyos did not lose count of the prisoners even once. It was clear from the murmuring when they dispersed that none of them could believe their good fortune. The count, usually an excruciating process of an hour or more, took less than fifteen minutes by Julian's best guess. As relieved as he was to be spared the strain of standing on his much-abused right leg while the Vorta toyed with his captives, Julian was also astounded. Could it be that his dangerous insolence, which had been a measure of his despair more than an act of intentional defiance, had persuaded Deyos of the pointlessness of his game? It seemed too good to be true, and yet the evidence was incontrovertible: the Vorta was no longer toying with them, at least not over the count.

Because the prisoners were dismissed so rapidly, the barracks inspection was still underway when Julian returned to his cell. Two Jem'Hadar stood in the doorway, preventing it from closing, as they took stock of the pristinely-made beds, canteens tucked out of sight beneath. They made no attempt at a search, took no measurements, and said nothing at all. They merely looked up and down the two rows of precisely-made beds, then turned and marched past Julian to the next barracks in the pod. It was a pointless exercise, at least until some unfortunate prisoner got careless or slept late, giving the guards an excuse to mete out punishment for a meaningless infraction.

Julian was too energized to dwell very long on this grim prospect. The vindication of the rapid count was only a small part of it. Yesterday's revelations had done more than crystallize his hopes of escape. They had dissolved the smothering crust of helplessness that had been hardening around his heart. There was still so much that was beyond his power here, but to be able to take measurable action towards escape — even if only in sharing a few coordinates and technical specifications with Enabran Tain — had buoyed his confidence and reinvigorated his spirit.

Although he was stiff from another night on the unyielding cot, and his stomach was painfully pinched with hunger in anticipation of a meal still four hours away, and his knee throbbed dully beneath its snug, improvised dressing, Julian felt more vital and alive than he had at any time since he had crawled into the sumptuous bed on Meezan IV. He went to his bunk, folded his bedding into a bolster for his leg, and waited for the others to return to the barracks.

Kalenna was the first, and she kept a watchful eye on the corridor until the door closed. She hurried over to Julian, her ordinarily impassive face furrowed with concern. "Did the guards make trouble for you?" she demanded in a hurried whisper.

"Trouble…" Julian echoed, briefly uncomprehending. Then he understood: the Jem'Hadar could have done anything at all to him, out of sight of the other prisoners and their superiors. He shook his head. "They took a quick look at the place, then left. They didn't even — I mean, I'm assuming they  _don't_  ordinarily overturn the mattresses?" He nodded towards Tain's bed, which concealed the prying tool.

Kalenna followed his gaze, her lips vanishing into a thin, pale line of strain. "Never yet," she said. "It is not… they assume we can have nothing of use, nothing of value. Every prisoner is searched and scanned upon arrival. Everything we might have turned to some advantage was taken from us then: weapons, communications devices, everything. Was that not the case with you? Did they not confiscate your weapons?"

Julian's fingertips drifted up to brush the place just above his heart where his combadge should have sat. He still felt oddly naked without it. They had let him keep his rank pips, rightly deeming them to be useless.

"They took my communicator," he said. "I didn't have anything else on me. I was in bed. I suppose I was lucky I didn't take off my boots that night."

A small twitch of amusement touched Kalenna's lips, and she sat down on the corner of the nearest bench. "I used to fall prey to that habit myself, when I was a new operative. The days were long, the training gruelling. Sometimes it seemed easier not to get undressed before falling into bed. Little did I know I might one day have no choice."

Julian nodded his sympathy. He had removed his boots before lying down last night, thinking he would be more comfortable. He wouldn't do that again: he'd awakened after a few hours shivering convulsively, with feet that felt like twin blocks of ice.

"Why do they let the Klingons and the Cardassians keep their armour?" he asked. It would have been easy enough to strip away the protective gear and leave the prisoners with only their soft underlayers.

"For the ring, of course," said Kalenna. "The Jem'Hadar are studying us, learning our combat tactics. It is a more useful experience if we are dressed as they expect to find us in the field."

Julian looked down at his front. There were smears of greyish dust on his lap, no doubt remnants of yesterday's foray into the wall. He brushed at them absently, considering his uniform. It was indeed exactly what the Jem'Hadar could expect to find Starfleet officers wearing in battle — the new, more versatile version that was being rolled out across the fleet was not different in any tactical sense. Both styles offered little protection compared to General Martok's mail or the heavy shells of the Cardassian breastplates.

"Yes, Doctor," Kalenna said with grim understanding. "Not much to shelter you from the fists and boots of the Jem'Hadar, is it? You wore it so proudly once, but how will it repay you here?"

Julian squared his shoulders, hitching himself up a little so that he wasn't slouching against the wall. He was still wearing his uniform proudly, he told himself. It was dusty and rumpled, and beginning to smell faintly under the arms, but he had earned it and it was a symbol of all that he had achieved since enrolling in the Academy. It did not need to shield his body from harm; it safeguarded his spirit.

"It doesn't matter," he said resolutely. He managed a sardonic little half-smile. "I'll move faster without armour, anyhow."

Kalenna shook her head, about to speak when the door shrieked open. The Breen came in and made straight for their bunk, and then Martok entered, moving with his customary broad gait. As he came up the length of the room, he began to unbuckle his belt so that he could tuck his arm inside his vest. Julian was pleased by how faithfully the Klingon abided by their compromise. Despite his proud words about resuming his place in the combat rotation, he was serious about helping his elbow to heal.

"Tain is coming," he said, glancing at Kalenna before drawing to a halt near enough to cast a shadow over Julian. "There is not much time to say what I wish to say. But it is important to me that you know, Doctor, that it was not my desire to keep the secret from you. I believed you trustworthy, but that Cardassian desired caution."

"I understand," Julian said, nodding up at him. "But I don't think Tain was being cautious. I think it was a game."

Martok bared his teeth in aversion to this idea. "A game? Why would he do that?"

"I don't know," Julian admitted. "But he didn't seem very upset to be found out, did he? Certainly not wary or frightened. He was pleased."

"So he was…" muttered Martok thoughtfully. He stiffened, and his head whipped towards the door as it opened again. The broad Cardassian came in, moving more slowly than usual. Parvok was at his elbow, silent and watchful. As the door closed, he took up the post at the window.

"Major, if you'd be so kind," Tain said, waving towards his cot.

"Is the corridor clear?" Kalenna asked, looking to Parvok.

"Clear," he agreed.

Taken by a sudden impulse, Julian pulled the clumsy bolster out from under his leg and got to his feet. Yesterday's adventure inside of the wall had not seemed to hamper the steady mending of his knee, and he moved with greater ease than he had done in days.

"Allow me," he said, brushing past Kalenna as she rose. He took the foot of the cot, and the Romulan woman took the head. They lifted it swiftly away, Julian's end sweeping out at an angle. He retrieved the tool from beneath the pallet, and pried the trapezoidal panel off of the wall.

"Proving you're one of us, I see!" Tain chuckled. "Very well, Doctor Bashir: suit yourself."

Julian shook his head a little at the man's indulgent tone, once again skirting the edges of a smile. He had his arm inside the wall now. The side of his fist made a better mallet than his palm had done, and the lower panel jolted off the wall. He moved it aside, careful to get a good grip on the heavy plate, and watched as Enabran Tain got carefully to his knees and wriggled into the crawlspace.

"You can close it now, Doctor," he sang out as he moved to rise. Julian obeyed quickly, replacing the panels in reverse. He hid the tool, and Kalenna helped him move the bunk. He put his full weight on his right leg for the first time in days, so that he could scuff away the scratch-marks on the floor with the toe of his left boot. After all, it was the rust scales that had tipped him off as to the oddness of the wall in the first place. If he had noticed, so could the Jem'Hadar — presumably.

"One of us," said Kalenna, quiet pride in her voice. Martok nodded. Even Parvok, now settling with his shoulder to the door-frame, seemed to lend his tacit approval. The Breen may have long ago given up any attempt to speak, but their silence seemed convivial now, at least to Julian's fertile human imagination. He tried to smile, but he couldn't quite manage it. His throat felt uncommonly tight. He offered an unsteady nod instead.

 _(fade_ )

There was no need of pretext when it came time to let Tain out of the wall for the meal. Parvok simply went to the door to ensure the corridor was clear, and then the bed was moved, the panels pried off, and Tain came crawling out again. He huffed and puffed as he climbed to his feet, but he seemed satisfied as he stood up between Martok and Kalenna, who had been the ones to free him from his hidden workshop.

"A fine morning's work," he said. "I should be able to boost the signal as you suggested, Doctor."

Julian was re-wrapping his leg, tightening a bandage made loose by the appreciable reduction of inflammation. He lifted his eyes from his task to acknowledge Tain's words. "I'm glad," he said.

He was more than glad. It made him feel useful, effective, competent. The only other time he'd felt that way here was in the moment when he successfully slipped General Martok's elbow back into place.

Tain brushed the worst of the dust from his close, meandering up the room so that the wall could be put right behind him. Apparently that task was beneath him. He was the architect of their grand escape, after all, and presumably the only one who could make sense of the rat's nest of circuitry concealed in the darkness. Let the others do the grunt work: he was the great Enabran Tain.

They weren't very charitable thoughts, but Julian didn't like the smug look on the Cardassian's face. He had spent most of the morning mulling over Martok's words, both today and earlier. He had been eager to tell the truth, and it had pained him to be forbidden from doing so. When he had stopped Julian's questions about the layout of the compound, he had claimed the conversation was dishonourable. Now Julian understood that hadn't been a judgement on a false hope, but on the withholding of this vital true one. The noble warrior had balked at keeping this from Julian, but Tain had fed his wariness and dismissed his unease — all for his own amusement? So it seemed.

They went out to the atrium together, all six inmates in close formation. It was the first time they had done so, and Julian reflected that it would be better if they didn't do it again. It felt too concerted, moving as one. It made them seem like a tightly-run unit. They were a group of odd wheels: the only human in the prison, the only Klingon, the only Breen, the only woman, and untouchable Tain. Only Parvok was nondescript, no different from the dozens of other Romulan men captured when the joint fleet fell. His very unremarkableness made him remarkable in this company. They were too conspicuous when gathered together.

Julian broke away from the group, glad when the others let him go — all save Martok, who followed.

"We are too eye-catching?" he muttered, jerking his chin knowingly back towards Tain and the rest.

Julian nodded tightly. He felt a dull ache above his right ear as he did so, but it was the first pain he'd had from his head injury all day. "Eating together makes sense," he said. "Even standing together, or lining up in a group. We share a barracks and we're used to one another's company: of course we'd gravitate to each other. But  _moving_  together looks…" He gestured vaguely, hoping Martok would understand.

"It looks like we are used to functioning together, not merely existing beside one another," the warrior agreed.

"Exactly," Julian sighed, grateful to be understood.

Martok nodded. "I will speak to Tain when it is safe to do so," he said. "I think it would be better coming from me. And you will explain to the Major?"

"Yes," said Julian.

The klaxon sounded. Julian's stomach wrenched ravenously. He had his canteens in the crook of his arm, and he hurriedly drained the second one as he moved into the line. He was grimly proud of himself for making the sparse water ration last the whole day. He still felt constantly thirsty, but it was a grinding irritation rather than a torment. Right now, his hunger was worse. He wasn't going to have any difficulty forcing down the grey mash today.

 _(fade_ )

Julian did not recognize the species of the man selected to fight in the ring that afternoon. He went out to wait for his chance to help, leaving the others to stand watch while Tain worked inside the wall. But when the second bout ended with the prisoner huddled on his side by one of the sounding posts, he climbed into the ring and got down on his knee (more smoothly today, thank God for small mercies) only to be turned away.

The man was still conscious, though obviously winded and in pain. He choked out in stilted syllables his refusal of Julian's aid. The Starfleet Universal Translator had his language in its memory banks, so there must have been some prior Federation contact. Julian understood what he was saying, even if the words were not what he wanted to hear. He did not want to be touched. He did not want to be helped. He wanted the —  _something_ : the translation was imperfect, and this guttural word eluded it — to go away and not make trouble for him.

Julian went. There was nothing else he could do. A lucid patient had an absolute right to refuse treatment. It galled him, and renewed the sense of helplessness he had fought off so successfully, but it was the only ethical thing he could do. To try to examine the man against his express wishes would be assault. Julian returned to Barracks 6 with a heavier step than he had left it.

No one questioned his prompt return, though surely they had all heard the conclusion of the match and the noise the Jem'Hadar made while moving off. Julian did not want to go back to his cot: somehow that seemed the passive thing to do. Instead, he moved to stand before Martok.

"Can I examine your elbow now?" he asked. When he had helped the General through his exercises that morning, he had said the arm could rest until evening. He waited for the Klingon to remind him of that.

Instead, Martok rolled his shoulder out of the arm of his vest, unbuckling his belt. "If it pleases you, Doctor," he rumbled. He said not another word as he indulged Julian's need for action, his irrational desire to prove himself capable of caring for a patient, any patient, as if the alien's refusal of his ministrations had cast some doubt on his abilities as a physician.

He felt more comfortable in his skin when he was finished, and Martok's elbow once again freshly wrapped and tucked into the improvised sling of his garments. Julian did not know how to thank the General — did not even know if thanks would be welcomed.

"It's healing well," he said quietly instead.

Martok snorted appreciatively. "Then it is worth the bother."

Julian nodded levelly and went to sit on his cot after all. As he helped himself to the first draught of today's two litres of water, he thought he saw Major Kalenna fighting off an entertained smile. She found them comical, apparently.

 _(fade_ )

Although he had done very little that day, Julian felt leaden with weariness by the time curfew came. He went out to tend to biological necessity, waiting his turn among a crowd of prisoners all needing the same. It was a relief to lie down at last, huddled under the thin blanket. He was drowsing by the time the last call for curfew blared out from the comm system, and asleep before General Martok started snoring.

Morning came too early. Julian was still half-asleep when he rose to make up his bunk. Kalenna had to correct him on the placement of his blanket. He had tucked it too near the foot of the bed, a lapse in his attention to detail that was both uncharacteristic and a an incontrovertible symptom of fatigue. He wondered how many hours lay between curfew and roll call. He didn't suppose there was any way to find out without lying awake all night counting the minutes. The many alterations to his neural structure and brain chemistry had not endowed him with a faultless internal chronometer. He could keep track of time if he focused, but boredom or a significant distraction threw him off, and sleep wiped the slate clean without fail.

Julian didn't need to counterfeit his stance for the count this morning. He could stand properly at attention if he shifted his weight ever so slightly to the left. His knee was greatly improved, and he would probably be able to forego the dressing entirely tomorrow. The injury was now six and a half days old. He had been in this place for a week.

It seemed longer.

Deyos was prowling up the opposite line of prisoners. He stopped in front of one of the Cardassians and murmured something in his unctuous tone. The captive's face contorted, but he did not reply. Deyos grinned. "What a pity!" he announced, starting back towards the beginning of the line again. "I've lost count!"

He had made it to twenty-eight again: a too-deliberate repetition of the day before yesterday. Sure enough, he got as far as fifty-six before starting up again, and then "lost count" at fourteen. How anyone could lose count of anything at fourteen, Julian did not know.

The other prisoners seemed to be aware they were in for a long, uncomfortable and frustrating morning. With every pair the Vorta counted off on his fourth attempt, the unseen tension in the lines grew. Julian's sensitive ears picked up a strange ebb and flow to the ambient sound around him, and after a few more numbers were recited for the benefit of the population, he realized what it was. Every time Deyos paused before uttering the next number, two hundred and three prisoners held their breath. They only exhaled when the count continued.

Julian was doing it, too. Deyos was up to sixty-eight now, more than halfway up the line. Now that he was aware of the unconscious expression of anxiety, Julian resisted it. It was surprisingly difficult: he had fallen into the rhythm of breathing in time to those around him and his body rebelled against the change.

"Seventy-two, seventy-four, seventy-six," the Vorta announced. "Seventy— First Ikat'ika, is this man standing straight?"

The man in question was a Romulan, half a head shorter than the prisoner behind him. He was standing at resolute attention, but as Julian watched, he swayed ever so slightly. He was probably light-headed. Holding the count before the prisoners were fed was one more petty cruelty. Every one of them was hungry, some were probably borderline hypoglycemic, and there were bound to be the occasional episodes of syncope.

Julian felt a thumb and forefinger close on the waistband of his jumpsuit, twisting the fabric from behind. "Don't do it, Doctor," Enabran Tain breathed, a serpent's subtle insinuation. "Don't interfere."

He knew the advice was sound. He was just beginning to recover from his last attempt to intervene during the count. And, he remembered with a bone-deep chill of horror, the Vorta had promised to vaporize the next prisoner Julian tried to defend. If he stepped in to protect the Romulan, he would be signing his death-warrant. Still, he did not know if he could watch a man beaten because enforced hunger had made him dizzy.

"Never mind: I daresay he's straight enough," Deyos said boredly, turning away from the Romulan with a disdainful waft of one pallid hand. "Oh, but I've gone and lost the count again! So many  _distractions._ It's really a disgr—"

"Seventy-eight!"

The syllables seemed to crack on the air. Julian had to restrain the urge to clap a hand over his mouth, half-believing that he had said it himself. But he hadn't: his lips were still pasted together with the faintly sticky residue that now clung perpetually to his teeth, no matter how aggressively he rubbed at them with his fingertip. Tain's hold was gone from the small of his back, too: surely that wouldn't be the case if he had done something so foolish.

The other day, he had been numb with horror and dismay. His mouth had moved of its own accord, convinced it had nothing to lose. This morning, he was far more rational. Correcting the Vorta was a damned fool thing to do, and Julian knew better today. But someone, moved by his earlier show of reckless defiance, else did not.

Deyos whipped around, pale eyes blazing. "Who said that?" he demanded sharply. He looked up the far row, and then down the one before him. "Who has decided it's his place to educate  _me_  on how to perform my duty to the Dominion?"

He stepped away from the first line, and strolled towards the second, looking up and down the row as he approached its centre. His head swayed from side to side as he did so, snake-like. A thin, cold smile played on his lips.

"I should keep every one of you standing here until the guilty man confesses," he said with relish. "Even if it takes us through ration call. Even if every one of you must stand here all day. Would you like that? I'm happy to have the Jem'Hadar dispose of any dissenters. Or will the guilty man  _confess_?"

No one, guilty or gallant, wanted to confess. Julian understood that plainly. If he had been the one to speak out, he wondered if he would have had the courage to admit it now, with that terrible smile on the Vorta's face. Two of the armed Jem'Hadar had broken formation to follow him. Ikat'ika and the other pair stood silent, watching from the other side of the arena.

"No one?" Deyos cooed. "No one is going to admit to his insolence, and save the rest of the prisoners a long and painful wait?"

He was met with silence. Julian heard the shuffle of uneasy feet as several prisoners struggled to maintain their rigid stance despite tremors of dread. Someone made a low noise of blistering discontent. But no one spoke.

"Very well!" sang Deyos. "So be it! I could keep you standing here until you fell one by one, and the Jem'Hadar would pick you off as you hit the floor. But I'm not going to do it today. Because it really doesn't matter who corrected me  _today_ , does it? Whoever you are, I know you didn't come up with that  _insolent_  idea all on your own. Now did you?"

He was meandering up the line now, headed for the lighted ring of the arena. He had his hands clasped behind his back in a way that reminded Julian momentarily, excruciatingly, of Jadzia as she strode along the upper level of the Promenade. But the memory crumbled to dust as the Vorta drew nearer.

"He didn't get the idea on his own, did he,  _Doctor_?" Deyos asked. Julian thought he had not heard such contempt loaded into that cherished honorific since his time in the bowels of Terok Nor. The overseer, the Odo of the Mirror Universe, had delighted in mocking him for his absurd claim that he had spent his adult life practicing medicine instead of toiling in the mines.

Deyos leaned in, head cocked so far to the right that his pronounced aural ridge almost brushed his shoulder. "Well? Where did he get the idea to correct me? Enlighten us all, or Verat'elar here will shoot…" He glanced down the row of prisoners, and his eyes fell on Kalenna. "The  _woman_."

"He got it from me," Julian said swiftly. His voice was taut with anger, and he knew his own eyes were burning now. The threat had infuriated him, not cowed him — but he did not dare to disobey.

Deyos raised his eyebrows credulously. "I'm sorry, what was that?" he said breathily.

"The man who corrected your count," Julian enunciated, slowing his speech considerably now that the plasma rifle was back at low-ready instead of pointing at Major Kalenna; "got the idea from me."

"From  _you_ ," Deyos affirmed, sounding both satisfied and regretful at the same time. "From Doctor Julian Bashir, formerly of Starfleet. From the new troublemaker. The agitator. The man who does not know his place."

He took two crisp steps backward, neatly clearing the lip of the arena. He waved back over his shoulder with two crooked fingers. "First Ikat'ika, complete the count!" he ordered, as he had on the day when the guards had beaten the Cardassian so savagely that he had died of his hurts. "You two: bring the  _doctor_  with me."

They moved as if to seize him, so they could drag him from the line. But Julian stepped forward instead. It was a small act of defiance — but then, so his interruption two days before had been. That had inspired in at least one other person the courage to speak up. Who knew who else might have found hope in his words?

Julian stepped between the two Jem'Hadar, turning to face down the row towards the administration pod. For a moment, the guards did not seem to know what to do. Then they each clamped their inner hand on his upper harm, training the plasma rifles in towards him with their outer arms. They marched him down the length of the row, and Julian walked between them with his head held high. He was grateful that his knee was in fine form today: he was able to walk without a limp.

 _(fade_ )

Once inside his office, Deyos abandoned his measured stride. He shot around the Jem'Hadar on Julian's left, antic with rage as the door slammed shut.

"You insolent, obstreperous, disobedient  _human_!" he snarled, seizing the front of Julian's grey uniform shirt just below the throat and yanking viciously. Julian was forced forward, his arms still held by the Jem'Hadar. He was nose to nose with the seething Vorta.

"That isn't an insult, you know," he said coldly. "No matter how rudely you say it. Neither is 'Doctor'."

"Oh, but that's where you're wrong!" Deyos hissed. The insensible rage faded from his eyes, simmering down to two embers of chilly hate. He released his hold on Julian's front with a noise of disgust, and marched behind his desk. There was a stylus on the lip of one of the control plinths, and the Vorta snatched it up, running a thoughtful thumb and forefinger along its length. "Here we are again,  _Doctor_ , and the question remains: what are we going to do with you?"

He flicked the stylus at the Jem'Hadar, and the bruising hold on each humerus suddenly released. Julian straightened himself, keeping his hands at his sides and his fingers deliberately relaxed. He was not about to show his tension or his apprehension.

"I am going to be civil about this," Deyos said, almost thoughtful. Then he fixed his eyes on Julian. "You have one opportunity to kneel before me, or I will have the Jem'Hadar put you where you belong."

He expected recalcitrance: that was obvious. But Julian was thinking about his knee, almost healed now. Another bad knock would set him back days. Keeping his head erect and his back straight, he made use of his freshly-regained dexterity to drop smoothly to his left knee. He placed the right beside it, far more cautiously than he could have done with his feet kicked out from under him.

Deyos stared. It was only a moment's dumbfounded gawking, but it was immensely gratifying nonetheless. The Vorta's arrogant expression faltered just for an instant. Julian had scored a point in this match of wits and wills.  _Fifteen-love for the human_ , he thought wryly. He decided he'd been the one to initiate it, even if he had done so two days ago.

"Well!" Deyos said crisply, recovering his demeanour and his illusion of control. "Now that you're down there, count for me."

"Count what?" Julian asked, too perplexed to consider the tactical consequences of his question. He stiffened reflexively as the words came out, ready for one or both of the Jem'Hadar to strike him. Neither did.

"Count," said the Vorta with relish; "to two hundred and three. By twos, please. Aloud."

Now Julian understood. He had been singled out as an agitator and he was to be punished for correcting the count… by being made to count. It was strange, but symmetrical.

"Two," he began, shaping each number crisply and keeping hard eyes on the Vorta's face as he obeyed. "Four. Six. Eight. Ten. Tw—"

"Begin again!" said the Vorta, cutting him off sharply. He meandered back around the desk, toying with the stylus.

Julian did not give him the satisfaction of questioning this instruction. "Two," he repeated. "Four. Six. Eigh—"

"Begin again," said Deyos, more lazily this time.

A crawling sensation rippled up the back of Julian's neck as he saw just how long this game could go on.

"Two," he said, keeping his voice hard and level. "Four. Six. Eight. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen. Sixt—"

"Begin again," said Deyos. And he smiled.

 _(fade_ )


	19. The Voiceless

_Note: Gul Macet worked HARD for those muttonchops. ;-)!_

**Part IV, Act II: The Voiceless**

"Fifty-four, fifty-six, fifty-eight…" Julian croaked. His mouth was parched and his larynx taut and burning with overuse. "Sixty. Sixty-two. Sixt—"

"Begin again," said Deyos.

It took every iota of muscular control that Julian still possessed to keep from flinching at those words. As the repetitions dragged on, they had begun to take on a curious power. Those two words felt like a physical shock, sharp, sudden and painful. Julian let his eyelids droop briefly, shading eyes that stung in the comparatively brilliant light of the Vorta's office.

"Two," he said hoarsely, forcing himself to ennunciate. The repetitive nature of the task was mind-numbing. At first, he'd tried to entertain himself with other thoughts. Now, all he could do was count aloud while his inferior frontal gyri melted slowly to putty. "Four. Six. Eight."

He was unsure how long this exercise had dragged on. He was hesitant to call it torture, wretched though it was. He knew he could have expected far worse. His throat was raw and his voice was strained, but he hadn't been beaten. As stress positions went, kneeling up straight did not rank very high, either. Still, the need to hold the pose for such a long period of time was beginning to wear on him. His shins and feet were numb, but his knees were on fire. The long muscles of his quadriceps and the complex groups in his hips and pelvis ached perniciously. He longed to stand up, or to sit down, or even to ease back on his heels, but he wasn't allowed to adjust his position. He had tried it, about a hundred  _begin agains_ ago, and he had wound up with a plasma pistol pressed to his Atlas joint, right over his brainstem. Julian wasn't prepared to die just for the relief of moving his legs a few centimetres, so he hadn't tried again.

His stamina, supposedly, had been enhanced along with so many of his physical attributes. Julian supposed that meant he was outlasting a natural human, but even augmented stamina was not infinite. He was reaching the limits of his endurance. The pain was not intense, but it was constant, it was deep, and it was spreading. He had felt two hot spasms in his thoracic spine during the last long string of numbers, and his shoulders were beginning to ache with the effort of supporting his neck.

"Ten," he said, his tonsils burning. "Twelve. Fourteen. Sixteen."

He had been distantly aware over the past few days of the absence of any humidity in the air of Internment Camp 371. There had been a faint soreness in his sinuses, and his hair felt brittle to the touch. But over the last interminable hours, that distant awareness had begun to eclipse other, larger concerns. His mouth was intolerably dry, and a hairline crack had opened in one corner of his lip. His thirst was rapidly overtaking the low, constant pain that was grinding down his will to resist. And yet he kept counting.

"Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-One. Twenty-tw—"

"Begin again," said Deyos. He sounded disinterested, but he was apparently tireless. He paced back and forth leisurely, still toying with that stylus. Now and then, he slapped it against his palm. Mostly, though, he stroked the handle, which was sculpted in a featherlike triangle complete with filigreed vanes.

"Two," Julian breathed, his chest hitching spastically. "Four. Six. Eight. Ten. Tw—"

It was not Deyos that interrupted him this time. The klaxon blared out two sharp blasts. Julian stiffened at the sound, his eyes travelling to the ceiling as if to seek out its source. His salivary glands burned fruitlessly: his mouth was too dry to water. His stomach clenched hungrily, though. And now he knew how long he had been on his knees.

Deyos smiled slowly, watching all of this. "Oh, you won't be drawing your ration today, human," he said pleasantly. "Perhaps hunger will blunt that sharp tongue of yours. Go on: keep counting! You haven't accounted for all the prisoners yet: two hundred and three, now that Hunter is dead. And the Cardassian."

Julian was too far gone in misery to feel the sting of the taunt about his dead patient or to wonder how much Deyos knew about the business with the Hunter's corpse. His numb brain was muddling through the implications of missing the ration call. His empty stomach churned wrathfully at the thought: the stewed slop they were fed was no great prize, but it was far, far better than nothing. Still, it was the thought of water that tormented Julian now. He still had his last few mouthfuls of yesterday's ration in his bottle in the barracks, but that was all. Right now, parched and hoarse as he was, he could have gladly downed the full two litres. How was he going to endure without?

"I'm waiting," Deyos said coldly. He had come around to the front of the desk now, towering over the kneeling prisoner.

Julian blinked up at him, uncomprehending. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.  _Waiting for what_?

Deyos seemed to read the question in his eyes. A faint smile rippled across his pale lips. He rapped the stylus on his palm again, and stroked its shaft. "Resume the count," he said. His mouth pursed in a moue of false sympathy. "Don't worry: you needn't start over this time. I understand that the interruption wasn't your fault."

That didn't make sense. Deyos had been smacking him back down to  _two_  for four hours, first gleefully and then habitually and then boredly. Why wouldn't he take the opportunity to do so this time?

"Go on," the Vorta cooed.

Julian moved his lips, aggravating the fissure at the corner of his mouth, but no sound came out. Awful, sickening panic seized him. He couldn't remember the last number he had spoken! He tried, but it was lost in a muddle of dozens upon dozens of repetitions and  _he could not remember_.

Deyos let him flail, helpless in his mind. Julian knew he ought to be able to remember such a simple thing, that his perfect recall and his highly attuned short-term memory should have found this no more difficult than the blinking reflex. But when he tried to access the number, he couldn't. He tried another pathway, searching for the sense memory, the motion of his mouth as he'd spoken. It wasn't there. He reached for aural recall — he had heard himself say it, of course he had, but the part of his brain that had stored up whole pathology lectures verbatim, viral load statistics and all, could not remember the simple one or two-syllable word that had been the last thing said in his voice.

Julian knew his dismay was showing on his face, and with it a wounded bewilderment. How could he have lost track of something to simple? Even with everything else, with the pressure in his knees and the pain in his legs and the feeling of sand in his hip joints and the thirst and the vague dizziness and the dread that this exercise might go on until he was driven mad with cerebral lassitude, he should have been able to remember!

"You see?" Deyos said, frigidly delighted. "How  _easy_ it is to lose count. Maybe next time you'll have a bit more patience for my frailties, Doctor. Would you like to begin again?"

Julian stared at him hollowly, trying to fight off his blind anxiety. It was understandable that he had forgotten, he tried to convince himself. All the interruptions, the repetitions, they were naturally blurring together. And it wasn't as if he had been  _concentrating_. But rational thought was poor armour against panic, and he didn't really succeed.

The Vorta leaned in closer, pale eyes gleaming. "I asked," he said with slow relish; " _would you like to begin again_?"

Julian's eyes lolled to the left, where the nearest of the two Jem'Hadar stood just at the edge of his peripheral vision. His rifle was slung across his back, but the plasma pistol was curled in one scaly hand, resting against the armoured thigh, ready to rise if need be. Julian did not want to begin again: he wanted this ordeal to end. But not in death.

Tightly, feeling the twinges of protest up and down his neck and into his heavy shoulders, he nodded.

"You have to say it," Deyos trilled, eyes growing wide as he smiled. "Ask me to let you start over again."

At first, Julian wasn't sure he could speak. Perhaps his voice had given out entirely. But slowly, excruciatingly, his sandpaper tongue moved and his lips spasmed and he spoke.

"Ma—may I start again?" he rasped.

" _Please_!" drawled the Vorta.

It took all of Julian's resolve, his determination to get through this and back to the barracks as unscathed as possible, to overcome the prideful instinct to refuse. But the analytical part of his brain was still whirring merrily along under the numbness of boredom and phsyical discomfort, and it reminded him that this was the most expedient strategy. This offered the most compelling odds for risk reduction and mitigation of damage. And if the cost was a little humiliation, that was an acceptable exchange. Wasn't it?

"Please," he croaked. "May I start again?"

"You may," said Deyos magnanimously. He reached out, and patted Julian condescendingly on the shoulder. "And  _do_  try to keep track of the count this time. It's very important."

Julian swallowed his pride, his mortification, and a sudden incandescent flare of rage, and fixed his eyes on the instrument pylons just beyond the Vorta's hip.

"Two," he said heavily, his dry throat clicking with the effort. "Four. Six. Eight…"

 _(fade_ )

The Vorta made him begin again thirteen more times before he finally tired of the game. As Julian toiled up past a hundred, past a hundred and twenty, on towards a hundred and fifty, he began to hope that maybe, at last, this was over. But hope was frightening, and he knew it would only make it worse when the inevitable interruption came. All he could do was count on, and brace himself.

"One hundred seventy-six. One hundred seventy-eight." His voice had failed him at last, and the words were scarcely more than a whisper. Odd: he'd had longer periods of sustained conversation in his life, without going hoarse. He was by nature a talkative man. But under this confluence of stressors — the repetitive, pointless recitation of simple numbers, the cold dryness of the air in his desperate throat, the strain and unrelenting though not objectively intense pain in every muscle required to keep him upright — his voice had simply given up.

Deyos was tired of this game: that was obvious. He set his stylus down on the desk and sighed, wandering away towards the door in the partition that subdivided the room. He flexed his fingers and shook his arms, meandering back and forth as the numbers climbed higher. Julian tracked him with his eyes alone: his neck was too stiff and sore to make turning his head worthwhile. He didn't trust this appearance of ennui to mean they were really done with this pointless game, but still he hoped…

"One hundred ninety-eight," he said. He found some tiny pocket of strength within himself, and thrust it into his vocal cords. He didn't want the Vorta to be able to claim he hadn't heard the final numbers. "Two hundred. Two hundred two. Two hundred three."

He had done it. Julian sagged at last, the determined rigidity going out of his body. He sank back onto his unfeeling heels, his spine curling forward, his hands sliding into his lap. He hung his heavy head between slumped shoulders, leaden with exhaustion.

The Jem'Hadar stepped forward, plasma pistol rising. Deyos flicked him away with a swatting gesture from the far corner of the room.

"Well!" he said, rubbing his palms together as he came to stand over Julian. His shoes were a glossy black, with round, blunt toes. The hem of his trouser broke neatly over the instep. The fabric was a marbled blue. "I was beginning to think we'd never finish."

Julian didn't speak. He wondered if he'd ever want to say anything again. He realized that was the point.

The Vorta crouched smoothly, leaning in to peer at Julian's face. He took hold of his chin in the crook of thumb and forefinger, and tilted back the human's head slowly. Julian did not resist the motion, although it awoke a grinding torment in his neck. He blinked laboriously at his captor.

"The next time you want to set a bad example for the others, think twice," Deyos advised. His lips twisted in disgust, and he planted his other palm across Julian's forehead to keep his head in place while he withdrew the hand from his chin, Deyos chafed his fingers together, looking at them with loathing as if trying to brush off something vile, or to overcome an unpleasant sensation.

"This is disgusting, you know," he said in an indignant, almost prissy tone. He shuddered and brushed his palm on the leg of his trousers. He peered at Julian curiously, studying his jaw. "These… bristles. You're covered in them. How do you stand it?"

This had to be some kind of game. There were plenty of mammalian species that produced facial hair, and several of them were represented in the inmate population. Julian refused to engage.

"Oh, it's all very well for the Klingon," said Deyos, curling his lip. "His people seem to have a fondness for…  _enthusiastic_ hair growth. And anyway, he commits to it. It looks intentional. But  _this!"_

He plucked at Julian's nascent beard. It was long enough now that the Vorta's pincered nails could close on one of the hairs. It stung as he pulled it out and held it up to the light. "You've only been with us for a week," he said, repulsed. "Is this process going to go on indefinitely?"

Julian didn't answer. He didn't actually know how long his beard would grow if left unchecked. He had never experimented, even as a teenager, preferring the clean, cool feel of a fresh shave and (if he were to be perfectly honest, even if it was a little vain), the polished, boyish, academic look. He didn't believe he'd ever gone a whole week without shaving, at least not since the peach fuzz on his chin had started to darken at the age of fourteen.

It made him feel unkempt and disreputable, and the Vorta's disdain wasn't helping.

"Thank goodness the  _Cardassians_  don't share this gene. Can you imagine?" Deyos released Julian's brow. His head rocked slightly, settling into a lolling, upturned posture that hurt, but didn't require any actual effort to maintain.

It  _was_  possible for Cardassians to grow facial hair. Garak had told him that once. But it required some aggressive interventions and artificial follicular stimulation to produce anything like a beard. If Romulans had stubble, Julian had never seen it. He thought he remembered something about a bearded Vulcan, but he couldn't call it to mind just now.

It was such a relief to think about something other than the perpetual drone of even numbers, inching up towards two hundred but never allowed to reach it. And the relief of slumping out of the rigid kneeling posture was tremendous.

"Suit yourself," Deyos huffed, planting a hand on each knee as he pushed himself back up to stand. "If you want to look like some sort of hirsute barbarian, feel free."

Julian rolled his neck slowly, kneading at the cramping muscles with one cold hand. He managed to find a marginally more comfortable way to hold his head up, but it was an effort. Did Deyos imagine he looked this way by choice? Or had he missed something — an offer of a shave, perhaps? He was familiar with the carrot-and-stick technique of exacting obedience from a malefactor. Captain Sisko was a master at it, particularly in his dealings with Quark. Of course, Sisko's sticks were always fiscal, rather than lethal, and his carrots never necessitated that someone first be denied the means to fulfil their basic needs.

If the Vorta had been expecting some sort of comment, he was disappointed. He flapped a hand at the Jem'Hadar. "Stand him up," he ordered idly.

Before Julian could bestir himself, hard hands clamped on his arms and hauled him upright. He didn't exactly struggle, but he was startled and trying to reclaim control of his limbs. They shook him twice, hard, and one of them knocked his feet into alignment with the toe of a heavy boot.

"You can let him go. He's not going to try anything foolish," said Deyos.

Even if Julian had intended to, he could not. His calves and feet were in a state of total paresthesia. As soon as the support was withdrawn from his arms, his legs crumpled beneath him, insensate. He lurched forward, sinking like a man taking a flight of stairs in slow motion, and caught himself on the edge of Deyos's desk. Julian gripped it with both arms, trying to keep himself upright while prickling daggers of fire awoke in his shins and his gastrocnemius muscles, working their way down towards ankles and feet.

The Jem'Hadar stirred behind him, but Deyos shook his head. He was watching Julian's struggles with curiosity.

"Do you humans simply  _never_  give up?" he asked, simultaneously astonished and contemptuous. "Lie down! It's so tiresome."

There was no imminent threat this time, and Julian's defiant streak was bristling. With a tremendous effort he got his forearms braced and his elbows locked, and he pulled himself up farther onto the desk. He planted his left foot, floppy and deadened though it was. It felt swollen to three times its natural size; an illusion caused by the nerves misfiring. When he pushed down upon it, the flaring, urgent neuralgia almost robbed him of breath. But it was a false signal: not real pain, not a sign of real injury. He rode it out, breathing heavily into the hollow of his crossed arms.

"Unbelievable," Deyos sneered. He turned his back on Julian, who tracked him out of the corner of his eye as he stared at the desktop. He didn't know if the Jem'Hadar were watching him closely, or if they were at an angle to see around his shoulders. He decided it was worth a try, and slid his left hand surreptitiously away from his right elbow.

"I see why the Founders have placed such a high priority on studying your species," Deyos was saying. He was still turned towards the dividing wall, staring up at the seam where it met the ceiling and shaking his head. "You are utterly incomprehensible."

Julian was too focused on what he was attempting to pay much attention to the Vorta's complaints. One of the busy little workaday corners of his mind was filing the words away for future reference. His brain was fully awake again, and it was a heartening feeling. And he'd seen one small thing he could salvage out of this wretched morning.

"Stubbornness for stubbornness's sake," Deyos went on. "Putting yourself at risk for the sake of a complete stranger, just because you happened to tie a bit of rag on his head the night before. Leaping into a ring of armed Jem'Hadar for the sake of a man whose Empire is at war with your people. Arguing the count just to be  _difficult_!" He whipped around, eyes blazing with irritation and loathing as he jerked a nod at Julian, still apparently struggling to stand. "And now this. It's so… irrational."

 _Not quite as irrational as you think!_ Julian kept his expression studiously impassive. There was feeling in both feet now, even though the pins and needles were still crackling along every nerve below the knee. He pushed himself off of the desk with his right arm, clutching his left across his abdomen as if his stomach pained him. He hoped that none of his three watching adversaries would pause to wonder why it should.

"May I go now?" he asked. His voice rasped against the effort of speaking, and he sounded like a victim of advanced laryngitis. "Please?"

Deyos gawked at him, flabbergasted. He shook it off like an inexplicable chill and set his face in its lax, bored lines again. "Yes, I suppose so," he said, flicking his fingers at each of the Jem'Hadar in turn. "Show him out. See that the meal distribution is finished before you let him out of your sight." He smiled once more at Julian, eyes as cold as the vacuum beyond the dome. "No water for the good Doctor today."

 _(fade_ )

He was unsteady on his feet, but the Jem'Hadar let him walk. Every muscle in Julian's limbs and back and chest ached dully, and his hip sockets felt full of ground glass. He was moving with an old man's gait. He had experienced that once before, in the mind-labyrinth created by the Lethean out of his insecurities about turning thirty. This sensation was very much the same: his body seemed to weigh twice as much as it should, his tendons were stiff and sluggish, and the risk of simply toppling over like a wooden figurine seemed ever-present and potentially disastrous.

He was limping again, too. They hadn't banged or battered or wrenched his knee, but it was slower to loosen up after the long hours of pressure than the left one. It seemed like an eternity ago that Julian had eased himself to the floor in order to spare the joint. He was bitterly tired.

The Jem'Hadar halted at the end of the administration corridor, letting him shuffle out into the prisoners' common space alone. Julian fixed his gaze on the passage that led to Barracks 6, far down on the other end of the yard. He cringed inwardly, realizing he had used the Vorta's word again. But the relative shelter of his cell was so very, very far away, and the space between seemed cavernous and desolate.

Suddenly someone was at his right elbow, offering him an arm to lean on. He hadn't noticed the approach, but of course it was Kalenna. Julian took the proffered support gratefully and tried to speak. Only a low, wheezing croak came out, and he tried to lick his lips. The tip of his tongue stuck, bone-dry and rough. He closed his mouth with an effort.

The Romulan woman was watching his face intently, but she said nothing. She seemed to understand, without being told, his desire to take cover away from the eyes of the guards and the speculative stares of the other prisoners. They walked on a few more metres, and a broad, dark shape stepped up on Julian's other side. He smelled the thick, spiced musk of Klingon body odour, and the tension in his weary frame eased a little more.

"Let us get you out of their sight," Martok muttered through the corner of his mouth. He took Julian's left elbow with his uninjured right hand, bracing him and bearing just enough of his weight that they were able to quicken their pace a little. "It gives the Jem'Hadar too much satisfaction to witness our misery."

Julian stole a sideways glance to reassure himself that Martok's left arm was dutifully gripping the strap across his chest. It was, and he leaned into the General's support with an easier conscience. He wished his legs were not so heavy and sluggish. And he would have given a great deal for the prospect of an appointment with a Vulcan neuro-pressure therapist. He had a feeling he was going to be working the knots out of his back for days.

It was a tremendous relief to turn the corner into the contained environment of Barracks 6, where at least there was an illusion of control. Even the roar of the door was comforting, especially as it closed. Julian let Martok and Kalenna help him to his cot, where he stretched out flat on his back and eased his arm above his head. There was a series of pops and crackles up his thoracic spine as he stretched; the intercostal joints correcting themselves. Julian wanted to moan in quiet relief, but he couldn't find the voice.

"Clear," Parvok said to no one in particular.

"Well?" a muffled voice demanded. It seemed strangely detached from the rest of the ambient sound around him, and it took Julian a moment to understand that it was Tain, speaking from inside the wall. "Any word?"

Martok made a low, rumbling sound of disapproval.

"He's here," Kalenna said calmly. "He was able to walk."

It was the barest of assessments of his condition, but it seemed to satisfy the unseen Cardassian. "Fine, then. What were the coordinates of the nearest listening post, Doctor?"

"That can wait until later, Tain," Martok growled. "Doctor Bashir has earned his rest."

Julian shook his head against the flat pillow beneath it and tried to speak. His breath caught painfully in his raw throat and he coughed. "Wah—one—" he croaked, a pitiful hiss of air. It was no use. He could barely make himself heard by those standing right over him. Tain wouldn't be able to make out a word.

He slid his arm off the edge of the bed and groped beneath it. His fingers closed on his canteen, the one that held the last swallows of yesterday's ration. He dragged it up onto his stomach and unscrewed the cap. Lifting his head to drink sent ripples of protest through his neck and shoulders and trapezius muscles, but he ignored them. As soon as the water touched his lips, all his firm intentions to husband what little he had dissolved. He drank every drop, avaricious in his thirst. Then he let his head fall back and sighed.

"Can you relay the numbers, Major?" he asked, excruciatingly hoarse but intelligible again.

"It can wait," she said, taking the bottle from his fingers and replacing the cap. She was watching him with something like sorrow in her eyes. "What did the Vorta do to you?"

Julian shook his head thinly, "Relay the numbers," he said, and he began to recite the coordinates Tain needed.

It felt so good to repeat a string of digits with worth and meaning. It was almost cleansing. After the senseless repetition of the long morning, rattling off the subspace address brought a sense of order and purpose back to that part of Julian's brain. Kalenna repeated them meticulously, and then from in the wall came Tain's confirming echo. Julian listened carefully and, when the numbers came back to him perfectly, nodded his head and closed his eyes.

"That's enough for now," said Kalenna, shooting the words back over her shoulder before bending over Julian. It was too much effort to raise his lids to look at her, but the cot rattled beneath him as she adjusted something, and then the folded blanket was slithering out from beneath his calves. He expected her to spread it over him, and was surprised at the maternal picture this conjured, but instead, a moment later, she lifted his right knee and slipped the blanket, tightly rolled, beneath it. "You were limping again," she said, by way of explanation. "Did they do your leg further injury?"

"If you do not wish to speak of what passed between you and the Vorta, you do not have to," Martok said forcefully. Julian understood what the Klingon was saying: if he had been tortured, they would not make him relive it. "And you can rest before you prove yourself again."

Julian did open his eyes now, a little surprised by this offer. He thought with some amusement that if he had indeed been replaced by a Changeling, Tain would have already tipped their hand to the spy. But he was busy now, fishing in his left sleeve with the first two fingers of his right hand and flapping his arm to dislodge what he had stolen.

"See what you can do with this," he rasped. He held up the Vorta's stylus, offering it to Martok. "If you can snap off the writing tip and get a sharp point on the handle, we can do blood screenings with a finger stick instead of a gash across the palm."

Martok made a noise of disapprobation, but Kalenna was looking at the stylus with clear appreciation.

"Well done, Doctor," she said approvingly. She plucked the tool from Martok's hand, and moved to the far bench to examine it. She was out of the easy range of Julian's eyes now, and he focused back on the Klingon. Martok watched him steadily as he sat down on the near table, adjusting his posture until he found a comfortable position for his stiff hip. Then he set about tucking his arm into his vest.

Julian felt he owed the others an explanation of his punishment, but he could not find the words or the will to speak. He could feel the moisture from his eager draught of water disappearing into the desiccated buccal tissue, and his throat stung more sharply than before. He tired to turn his mind away from the thirst, but he knew it wouldn't be that easy. He had just conquered the dehydration of his first two days at a half-ration and whatever had proceeded them. This would set him back to where he had started.

Kalenna returned, offering him the feather-shaped handle of the Vorta's stylus. She had successfully snapped off the functional shaft, and a jagged point stuck out where its base had been. Julian took it and, with much more force than he would have needed with a proper lancet, pricked the pad of his index finger to raise a globe of blood. He rolled halfway onto his shoulder to extend his hand to Martok.

The warrior wicked away the carmine globe with his own finger and examined the fluid. He grunted his assent. "So you have not been replaced a second time," he said. "That is fortunate. Fortunate for all of us," he added in a louder, pointed voice, casting it back over his shoulder towards the wall. He leaned in towards Julian and added in a growling whisper; "For a man so careful of his secrets, he does not fear the Founders as he should.

Kalenna stood over Julian, studying his face. "You were not taken to draw your ration," she said.

It wasn't really a question, but Julian shook his head anyhow. "Part of my reward for breeding discontent," he croaked.

Her expression did not alter from its thoughtful furrows. "There was no way to keep back a share of the food." This, too, was a flat statement of fact.

"I know," said Julian, trying to convey that he held her blameless for that. His stomach twisted painfully within him, and he willed it to be silent. This wasn't the moment he wanted it to grumble audibly.

Kalenna watched him wordlessly for another moment, and then seemed to make her mind up about something. She moved off, out of his easy line of sight. Julian heard the scrape of metal on stone.

"Sub-Lieutenant, bring your bottle," she said as she came back. She knelt beside Julian's cot and reached beneath it.

"What…" he started, rolling onto his side and propping himself up with his elbow. It was an awkward position, with his hip twisted but his knee still up on the bolster. The pains in his neck flared petulantly as he angled himself to watch.

Kalenna had one of her own canteens on the floor by her knee. She was opening Julian's empty ones — both of them. Parvok approached, reluctantly, with a bottle in his hand also. Kalenna looked at him imperiously and reached for it. He yielded it unhappily, but without hesitation. The Major looked up at Martok, sitting over her.

"Would you care to contribute, General?" she asked. "If we each give him half a litre, all four of us will have an equal share of water."

"And we'll all be thirsty," muttered Parvok. The green hue of his cheeks darkened when Kalenna whipped around to wither him with a look.

"Even with a full ration, no one has an abundance," she said. "But this way, no one will sicken for want of water, either. Do they teach you nothing in the military? The greatest good for the greatest number."

 _The needs of the many_ , thought Julian, remembering the Vulcan phrasing of the sentiment;  _outweigh the needs of the few_.

But there was a very un-Vulcan flaw in her logic. He was only one person, and they were three. "Kalenna," he began, but his words were slow to form in his dry throat.

"If he is fit, we have a doctor," the Major said, still apparently addressing her words to Parvok, but with a sudden pointedness that was not lost on Julian. "Not for the benefit of our barracks alone, for he has shown willingness to aid any who need his skills. Furthermore, he has knowledge of the Federation listening posts that will make it possible to expedite the transmission of our distress signal. He is a material asset to the unit, Parvok, to put it in words even a soldier should understand."

She turned her back on the sub-lieutenant, and opened his bottle resolutely. Carefully, she decanted half into one of Julian's. Martok already had one of his canteens open and at the ready. She took it next, filling the bottle to the brim this time and capping it carefully. Last, she opened her own and shared its contents equally with Julian's second bottle.

He watched all of this, speechless. It was exactly what they would have done if it had been Sisko, Jadzia and Miles sitting beside him instead. The Starfleet philosophy behind such a gesture would have been different:  _from each according to their gifts, to each according to their needs_. But the outcome would have been identical. Julian had not expected this from a group of strangers, even generous as Kalenna had been on his first day in the camp. It was a gesture of camaraderie that surprised him, although he reflected guiltily that perhaps it shouldn't have.

"What about… him?" Parvok asked, casting a pointed glance towards Tain's bunk and the hidden crawlspace.

"He took his bottles into the wall with him," Martok said, shaking his head ruefully. He cuffed Kalenna companionably on the shoulder. "The wily Cardassian knew what you would do before you decided yourself!"

"Let him keep his water if he wishes," said Kalenna scornfully. "We can manage on our own."

"He's the one who's working," Julian said quietly. It was hard not to eye his share of the water covetously. He was desperate for a drink. "It's hot behind that wall. He needs his full ration." He looked at the others, each in turn, lingering longest on Parvok. "Thank you. Thank you all. It's…"

"The greatest good for the greatest number," the sub-lieutenant said stiffly.

Kalenna started to stopper her bottle, when a shadow suddenly fell across the patch of floor she had used as a workspace. She looked up, as did Julian and Martok.

The Breen had come around from behind the General, and they now stood at the foot of Julian's cot. In one gloved hand was a dented, rusting water bottle. The Breen did not bend, nor make any sound. They merely waited until the others understood. The Breen wanted to offer their share.

Kalenna took the bottle, a look of wonder in her eyes despite the carefully guarded set of her mouth. "Thank you," she said, even though they all knew the Breen would not understand the words. Kalenna weighed the bottle with her hand, looking at the four half-filled ones before her on the floor.

"Let me see," she said, thinking it through aloud. "We have each given the doctor five hundred millilitres, leaving all four of us with a litre and a half. An equal share of a fourth full bottle, divided among four…"

There were no acrobatics to this math at all. It was one of those second-grade algebra problems that Jules Bashir had devoured like intellectual sweets.

"One hundred millilitres in each of our bottles," Julian said, his voice still rasping painfully. "Each of the five of us will have sixteen hundred millilitres."

It wasn't adequate hydration support for a human body, or a Klingon. Probably not for the Romulans either, though Julian could not begin to guess about the Breen. But when it came right down to it, two litres wasn't enough, either: it was barely sufficient to stave off dangerous dehydration. Deliberately so. The Dominion probably counted on prisoners hoarding their lean ration jealously, refusing to support one another at a cost to themselves.

Deyos had  _certainly_ been counting on it. Julian had no illusions about that. If they could thwart him in this, then they all gained something — something far more valuable than the cupful of liquid each of these people was sacrificing for his sake.

Kalenna doled out the water cautiously, and then had to make adjustments to equalize the levels in all five bottles. Julian would have been able to measure the fluid precisely by sight, but he did not offer his services. It was not just because that level of precision might be conspicuous. This was Kalenna's act of resistance, and she deserved the satisfaction of seeing it done well by her own hand.

_(fade)_


	20. Methods and Means

** Part IV, Act III: Methods and Means **

A low-pitched  _bang_  startled Julian from slumber, with the alarmeded certainty that he had overslept and missed some important reveille. He sat up with a jolt, rolling onto his elbow. Eyes still closed, brain still half-asleep, he barked, "Computer, time!"

His throat ground painfully at the effort, and his voice was hoarse. He couldn't quite remember why that should be as he drew his hands over eyes grainy with rheum and forced himself to waken fully. As he did, the first sound to rise to his ears was rolling, bubbling laughter.

"You're not going to be getting much of an answer to  _that_  request, Doctor!" Enabran Tain chuckled gleefully. Julian opened his eyes at last, and found himself looking straight across the narrow barracks at the aging Cardassian. He was on hands and knees, wriggling his substantial bulk through the hole in the wall. With his head thrust back so that he could grin at Julian, he looked like an overgrown child at play. "It feels like a full day's work to me, that's all I know."

Parvok hissed for quiet. He was watching Kalenna, who was stationed at the door, peering intently through the small window. Her lips had vanished into their taut, strained line. After a moment, however, she gave a tiny shake of the head.

Tain held his hand up, flapping it at the Romulan man. While Parvok helped the Cardassian rise, Julian sat up properly, a stiff and uncomfortable process that seemed to awaken every ache in his spine and his shoulders and his legs. His own blanket was still bundled under his knee, but someone had spread another over him. He looked around, wondering which cot was lacking, and that was when he saw Martok.

The Klingon was sitting on the bunk between Julian's and Kalenna's; the one he refused to sleep on. He was slumped heavily against the wall, his chin on his chest. His good eye was obscured in profile, but the near side of his mouth was swollen and purpled, and his lip was split in a dark, crusted line. Hurriedly, feeling again the onrush of anxious certainty that he had failed to wake in time for something essential, Julian heaved himself to his feet and approached.

"General?" he said softly, unsure if the Klingon had fallen asleep in such an uncomfortable position. But as he drew near, the lone eye found his face. It was glassy with exhaustion and obvious pain. Julian's burning throat constricted painfully. "They put you in the ring," he whispered, horrified.

They had put his patient in the ring, and he had slept through the battle. Guilt washed over him, suffocating. He beat it back wrathfully. There was no time for that now.

Martok grunted ruefully, trying to hitch himself up against the wall. He had no arm to help with the task, because he was clasping his left wrist high up against his breastbone. It was the position Julian had demonstrated for him on the floor of the arena, back when he had thought it a ridiculous admonition to tell this man to trust him. The nail-beds of the General's left fingers were dark and discoloured.

"Why didn't you wake me?" Julian said. He wanted to give it the force of a demand, but his voice was still rasped raw, and he could not manage more than a strained whisper.

"You had need of rest," Martok rumbled. At the same time, Kalenna said; "He told us not to."

"All for the best," Tain muttered. He took a teetering half-step away from the hole in the wall and coughed once, forcefully. He thumped his chest with a fist and grimaced like a man belching out a bubble of heartburn.

Despite the urgent case before him, Julian stared, understanding.

Tain met his gaze and smiled broadly. "I'm sorry we didn't wake you, Doctor, but you really did need your rest."

"Out," said Julian. The syllable was barely audible. He cleared his throat and pushed past the burning. "Out!" he snapped. His voice squawked painfully, but it managed at least to approach normal volume. "All of you, out. I need to treat him, and I don't need an audience."

Kalenna nodded briskly and slapped the door panel. Parvok was the first to hurry out. She stepped across the threshold, straddling the path of the doors so they could not close, and fixed hard eyes on Tain.

The Cardassian was massaging his chest, but he did not seem to be in any considerable discomfort. He looked amused, and Julian's anger deepened by a measurable degree. "Oh, very well," said Tain. "I could use a brief constitutional, a stretch of the legs. But later on, Doctor, it's my turn."

"Yes," Julian agreed. He would not have said more in front of the others, even if the situation had not been so galling. "Now get out."

Tain shrugged and meandered to the door, stopping briefly on his way to rap the Breen on the crown of their helmet. When the heavy head tilted, Tain pointed at the door. Silent as ever, the Breen rose and led the way out of the room.

"We need to get you on the table," Julian said rapidly, turning back to Martok even before the door began to close. He found the knot in the cord that laced the black sleeve in place, and untied it deftly. His voice was once more a whisper, but his mouth was almost perfectly level with the Klingon's ear. "You should have woken me. You must be in agony, and it's going to be harder to put your elbow right now it's had a chance to swell."

"It was a calculated decision," Martok growled. His teeth were clenched, and he hissed sharply as Julian took control of his arm to slide away the sleeve. He flung it onto the head of the bed and clawed at the knot that held the strip of blanket in place. "The Major is right: if you are well, you are of greater use to all of us. After this morning—  _Qu'vatlh_!"

The expletive, one of those that the Starfleet Universal Translators was always helpless to decipher, broke from his lips as the bandage came loose. Despite Julian's left hand, cupped under the forearm to support it, the weight of the joint shifted as he pulled the grimy strip away. He restrained any change in his facial expression as he took in the deformity with his eyes. It was unsightly, but not as bad as he had feared. With the inflammation around the joint it was difficult to be certain, but he thought it was a subluxation rather than a full separation.

"Onto the table," he said. "Get your good arm around my shoulders. I've got this one."

He thought he was prepared, but he still had to brace himself as Martok hauled his rigid body off of the cot. The Klingon's mass, the force he needed to exert to support himself, and the unstable surface beneath his thighs all made the manoeuvre difficult. Julian focused on keeping both his legs firmly planted and managing the injured arm.

"Do you have any abdominal injuries?" he asked as they shuffled to the bench. "Did the Jem'Hadar kick you in the ribs or the stomach?"

"Perhaps once." Martok ground out the words reluctantly. Julian knew enough about the Klingon approach to medical history to expect that meant at least three times. He didn't bother asking if the blows had been administered with a knee or a boot. "It will not prevent me from lying down."

The words  _I'll be the judge of that_  died on Julian's lips. He wouldn't be able to do an abdominal exam at all unless he removed Martok's armour. And trying to do that before his arm was set and bandaged would be excruciating. It would be torture. There was no other option but to override the usual triage and set the elbow first.

"Easy does it," he coached, hesitating briefly to swallow against the sting in his larynx. He didn't have much saliva to work with. He had slept himself back into dehydration. "Easy. I've got your arm."

There was nothing easy about it. Martok swore again, this time under his breath, as he stretched himself face-down on the bench. Today, he didn't need to be told to shift to the right: he positioned himself exactly as he had before, with his right arm hugging the underside of the table. Julian guided and positioned the outraged limb as gently as he could, but his patient's agony was obvious despite his efforts to conceal it.

He positioned himself as he had before, his right knee protesting less vehemently. It was an improvement, but Julian could not be grateful for his own condition while watching his patient's suffering. He focused on the task at hand, bracing the humerus and slowly rotating the forearm. He wanted to melt into a puddle of abject gratitude when he felt none of the telltale signs of fracture.

"How many fights did you manage?" he asked. It was time for the distraction.

"Two." Martok sounded disgusted, and Julian feared he might not say more. After a moment, though, he expounded; "I broke the first Jem'Hadar's arm. Have you ever seen one of them crack a limb? They make no sound, just a heavy exhalation and then silence."

The inflammation was severe. Julian was beginning to think it was the swelling, not the joint misalignment, that was most impeding the venous return from the hand. He was only going to get one good shot at this: a second attempt would be unbearably painful, even for one with the steely constitution of a Klingon warrior.

"Never," he said, trying to keep Martok talking but lacking both the conversational focus and the voice to say more. Fortunately, he did not need to.

"It is unsettling. Unnatural." Martok shook his head against the tabletop. "An enemy who does not cry out from time to time is a hideous thing. It is—"

 _Steady pressure on the humerus, right thumb against the olecranon, a smooth, purposeful motion to reduce the deformity_ … The elbow slid back into place with a  _clunk_ , and Julian could breathe again. Martok did not roar this time. He moaned, exhausted, and closed his eye as he sagged against the tabletop.

"When you're ready to sit up, I'll bind it," Julian promised softly. His throat clicked dryly as he eased his leg off the lip of the bench. Martok seemed to be resting, if not comfortably then at least without overt anguish. It was as good a time as any to avail himself of the gift of water his cellmates had so generously given.

He drank sparingly, just enough to wet his mouth and ease the burning in his throat. He had time to straighten and roll up the discarded bandage before Martok stirred. He rolled onto his right hip, shifting more medially onto the bench as he did so. Julian moved to help him sit. Previously, he had simply bandaged the elbow over the tightly fitted sleeve of the Klingon's shirt. This time, he rolled the sleeve as high on the upper arm as he could before wrapping the elbow.

"Your fingers are getting their colour back," Julian said. As he had hoped, Martok tilted his head to look. "That purplish colour means the blood wasn't draining as it should. Too long in that state, and you'd be at risk of blood clots. You might even suffer a pulmonary embolus." He freed one hand so that he could feel the fingertips. They were warming rapidly. "A clot could move into your lung and impair blood flow to the heart. That can be fatal, and there's nothing I could do to stop it."

Martok's eye narrowed in disapproval, glaring at Julian for a long moment before shifting away to stare at the seam of the ceiling. "Bind the arm, Doctor, and spare me your lectures."

"For the sake of my beauty rest, you might have died," Julian pressed. He knew he was scolding, but he couldn't help it. He did return his attention to the bandage, however. "I need you to understand how foolish that was."

"Be careful who you call a fool," muttered Martok. "I think you'll find that Klingon warriors do not take kindly to such insults."

"I don't take kindly to patients who delay seeking treatment for frivolous reasons," Julian bit back. He was glad he had taken the time to drink something: it had put a little force back into his voice. Miles had told stories of Worf's tutorials on the cultural divide between the Empire and the Federation. Klingons found tentative behaviour offensive, a personal affront to their honour. "Next time, wake me."

"Next time." The words were a rumbling growl, and Martok twisted his contused lips. The cut looked superficial, but the bruising was severe. Julian wondered if he dared to propose a quick dental check for cracked or loosened teeth.

There were more urgent concerns. He knotted off the bandage and eased the sleeve down over it. As bracingly as he could, he said; "We have to get the armour off. It isn't going to be pleasant."

"None of us are here for our pleasure, Doctor," said Martok. He was already fumbling one-handed with his belt. "Now do something useful, and lend me your thumbs."

_(fade)_

It was an ordeal of endurance for patient and doctor alike, and it required much careful negotiation and not a few choice Klingon invectives. In the end, however, the armour lay in a mountain on the floor, and Julian was carefully rolling the foul-smelling undershirt up Martok's chest and over his head before easing the lame left wing out of the oily sleeve. The smell of dead skin and body odour was strong enough to scorch his sinuses, but Julian shut his mind to the stimulus and focused on his patient.

He would have liked to suggest that Martok lie down to facilitate the exam, but it was clear from set of his jaw and the way that he was clutching the edge of the table with his good hand that he was in too much pain to endure much more motion now. So Julian made a quick visual inspection, noting the dark bruises on abdomen and flank and trying not to linger distractedly over the webs of knotted scars that intersected over Martok's ribs. They were old wounds, probably long predating his time in the camp. The bruises were fresh.

"Let me know when it hurts," he said, palpating firmly but as gently as he could. He knew the instruction was pointless, so he watched Martok's face instead. It was the same strategy he used for unconscious patients and children too small to speak for themselves, but it was just as effective in this case.

The bruises were nasty, and penetrated deep into the muscles sheathing Martok's abdominal cavity, but there was no telltale hardness of rigid hematomas. If any of the organs were ruptured or bleeding, there was no detectable sign. The only time Martok did more than tighten his grimace with pain was when Julian prodded a black bruise over the left crest of his pelvis, just above the waistband of his heavy leather trousers. The Klingon's whole body tensed for an instant, and he swung his leg as if the motion relieved the discomfort.

"As long as we've got you undressed, I might as well take a look at that hip," Julian said at length, not wanting to intimate that he had noticed the moment of vulnerability. "If you can stand up for a couple of seconds…"

Martok was already opening the front of his trousers. Julian bent to pull off the heavy boots, and then slid the pants down as Martok rose briefly. He helped the warrior adjust his position so that he was straddling the corner of the table, and he positioned himself on the dorsal side of the leg.

"I need to feel the movement in the joint," Julian explained, motioning with his hand to indicate where he needed to tuck it. It took Martok a moment to realize that this time, the Federation doctor was asking for permission instead of simply serving advanced notice. He nodded dismissively.

"Do what you must," he said.

Julian planted his palm along the inner thigh, his smallest finger abutting the edge of Martok's loincloth. There was no need to watch his hands, and so he gazed off vacantly at the riveted wall, hooking his other hand under Martok's knee so that he could lift and move the leg.

"Where is the pain?" he asked, as he felt the rotation of the joint. There was appreciable crepitus, and a marked lateral impingement in the range of motion.

"In the leg, of course," muttered Martok. He, too, was looking away, lips set in a thin line of endurance. Julian suspected this was a far more hands-on approach to medicine than the Klingon was accustomed to. He was tempted to explain that the same was true for him. A quick pass with a medical tricorder would have told him everything he needed to know about the joint. Without that luxury, he had to rely on his hands and his questions.

"Inside the joint?" he asked.

"Hmm!" Martok agreed.

"Down your thigh, here?" Julian traced the path of the adductor longus with the lightest pass of his left forefinger.

Martok grunted his confirmation of this.

"Into your groin?" asked Julian.

The Klingon's massive head turned sharply so that the single glittering eye could glare at him. Julian made direct eye contact, unflinching, and raised his eyebrows to repeat the question nonverbally. Martok's nose wrinkled briefly with distaste.

"Yes," he muttered.

Julian nodded to show he had expected this, and did not see it as a sign of weakness. "I think you may have torn your labrum," he said. "It's part of the cartilage inside of the joint. There's some calcification of the tendons, and I can feel a grinding sensation when I move your leg. It's been bothering you for quite a while, hasn't it?"

"A month?" said Martok. When Julian did not reply, he amended; "Perhaps longer. Six months," he admitted at last, his annoyance plain. "Give or take. What can you do about it?"

"Not much," Julian admitted. His hoarse voice wavered, and he tried to exert greater control over it. He had his facial expressions on a tight rein, but his strained vocal chords were getting the better of him. Sickening frustration was roiling in his chest. At home on Deep Space Nine, in his clean and state-of-the-art Infirmary, he could have restored the joint to health in under a minute. Here, there was nothing he could suggest but patience and the impossible.

"The joint needs rest," he said wearily, aware of the uselessness of this pronouncement. "Every time you lunge or leap forward, every time you land hard on your feet or catch yourself going down on the other knee, you put stress on the tear and on the ligaments and tendons trying to keep the hip stable. It isn't going to heal unless the constant barrage of trauma lets up."

Not only would it fail to heal, but the tear would only get worse. The cartilage might wear away entirely, leaving bone to grind destructively on bone.

Julian kept this prognosis to himself. It might not come to that. Tain had said he anticipated the transmitter would be functional in three weeks. It wouldn't take more than a couple of days to reach the nearest Starfleet listening post, even if they were as deep in Dominion space as the Omarion Nebula. Julian couldn't quite conceive of the sequence of events that might cause the message to finally reach the hands of Garak, but surely that couldn't take long. Jadzia and Commander Worf had their departments monitoring the communications relay twenty-six hours a day. And Captain Sisko had made use of Garak's skills and contacts in the past — most often at Julian's suggestion, to be sure, but even if the Changeling who had replaced him didn't make a similar proposal, Sisko and the others would eventually think of it. An unbreakable Cardassian code: who better to crack it?

And then rescue? Julian couldn't bear to think about that. He skirted around that part of the equation like a teenager chipping away at a mathematical proof from both ends. After the rescue, he would have access to his infirmary again, and all the miraculous tools of his mysterious profession. Then, he would be able to repair this joint in under a minute.

If they both survived that long. If the Vorta didn't tire of Julian's interference and order him shot where he stood. If Martok didn't falter in the ring and get his neck snapped by the Second in a fit of bloodthirsty pique. Degenerative osteoarthritis couldn't set in over the course of a month. Julian would be able to fix this hip some day.

He promised himself he would fix this hip some day.

"Let's get you dressed," Julian said hoarsely, stooping down to recover the softer of Martok's garments. The armour could be replaced tomorrow. "And I want you to sleep on the cot tonight."

Martok made a noise of discontent. "Klingon warriors—" he began.

"Do not sleep on soft beds. I know," said Julian. "We can remove the mattress if you like, but I can't let you sleep with your legs hanging off the edge of the bench without support. Not for the next few nights, at least. Don't worry: I promise the bunks aren't as comfortable as they look," he added dryly

Martok's eye snapped to his face, momentarily surprised. Then the Klingon laughed. It was a low, bitter chuckle, but Julian could not help but smile in return.

_(fa_ _de)_

Tain returned while Julian was lacing Martok's left sleeve back on to the tunic. This was an easier task with the mail and the plated vest still lying on the floor. The General had not been happy with Julian's suggestion to forgo armouring tonight, but he had consented. It was a sign, Julian thought, of how much pain he truly was in. The longing for some kind of analgesic, even a primitive one from a Sanctuary District pharmacy locker, to give to his patient was sickening, but Julian knew he would just have to make peace with the lack. Certainly Martok was uncomplaining. He jerked his head in greeting as the Cardassian entered the room.

"You wished for time alone with the doctor," he said, getting laboriously to his feet. He started for the door.

"Wait," Julian said. He plucked up the leather strap and reached around to affix it about Martok's chest. He helped the Klingon get a fistful of the belt into his hand. "As agreed," said Julian.

Martok huffed in aggrieved assent, rippling his fingers until he found a sustainable hold. "It is not very long until curfew," he warned as he left the barracks. "The rest of us will have to return soon."

Tain watched him go with a hunter's keen, sidelong glance. The door shrieked shut, and the aged Cardassian turned his gaze on Julian. The quality of the stare did not alter at all. Julian waited for the other man to speak, but almost a minute passed in perfect silence.

"It's your heart," Julian said at last.

" _What_?" said Tain. It was a crisp sound, intensively Cardassian. It sounded more like an utterance from the lips of Gul Dukat or some other high-ranking military official than the blustering, good-natured old gentleman Tain liked to project over himself like a holographic mirage.

"That sharp, deliberate cough, always just one at a time," said Julian. "Sometimes you'll thump your chest with a fist. And you rub your sternum, like this." He demonstrated with his own right hand, spreading palm and fingers flat in the centre of his ribcage. "Does your left arm go numb from time to time? Pain under your auxiliary vertebrae on that side? Nausea? Blurred vision?"

Tain chuckled. "You're a remarkable dreamer, Doctor!" he said. "I cough now and then, and what? You've diagnosed me with a heart condition."

"You cough," said Julian, speaking very precisely despite the rasp in his voice; "because you're trying to correct an arrhythmia. When you feel the fibrillation, you force the air out of your lungs to try to jumpstart your normal rhythm. It's an old trick, and I'm afraid not a very effective one. Are you having pain? This—" He massaged his chest again, as he had seen Tain do earlier. "—tells me you're having pain. It's called angina, and it means that the blood flow to the wall of your heart has been interrupted."

"Very clever," Tain sang. He was trying to bring this off as all highly amusing, but his playacting was imperfect. Julian could see the unease in his stance, and in the way his hard, bright eyes shifted in their shadowed sockets. "I underestimated you, Doctor. I thought you'd want to ask me all sorts of questions, but it seems you already have the answers."

"I don't have all the answers," Julian said, more gently. Now that Tain had as good as admitted his condition, his will to be firm-handed with the Cardassian dissolved. He was an adversarial manipulator, but now he was also a patient, in need of care and consideration. "I need to examine you. I haven't got my instruments, but there's a great deal I can tell from your pulse and your breathing and the sound of your heart. Please sit down. We don't have very much time tonight."

"Martok's mistaken about that," muttered Tain distractedly. He paced down to the back of the room, shaking his head as he stared off into the vacant distance. "We've got at least an hour until curfew. He's not very good at keeping track of the time. It's strange here, I'll grant you: these damnable Dominion days. But all the same, it does get tiresome having to correct him." He brightened momentarily, some of his bluster returning. "These Klingons! They don't enjoy being corrected, you know."

"Please come and sit down," coaxed Julian, gesturing to the table. "I promise I'll be quick, even if we do have an hour."

Tain turned back to face him, and it was all that Julian could do to keep from taking a startled step backward. The vacant look was gone. So was the grandfatherly amusement and the aura of the tenacious but amicable old man. The eyes Tain fixed on him now were as cold as the nitrogen glaciers of Ceti Alpha IX, and all the softness was gone from his broad features.

" _You_ ," he spat, with such scathing contempt that the word struck Julian like a slap across the face. When Tain continued, his words were hard as the jevonite so prized on his world. "You need to amend your behaviour and adjust your insufferable Federation disposition!"

"I—I—" Julian tried to speak, heard himself stammer, and shut his mouth resolutely.

Tain curled his lip in icy loathing at the young man's obdurate expression. "There it is!" he said. Then, with such scorn that he could have taught Deyos a thing or two about the word; " _Humans_. Arrogant. Sanctimonious. Proud as a Hebitian priestess and as stupid as an Yridian yak."

He descended on the younger man, striding forward with imperious purpose. Suddenly, Julian was exquisitely aware of how alone they were in the empty barracks. He could not run for the door, for that would mean turning his back on Tain. He might call for help, but if the others weren't near enough to hear him he knew no one else would come. He didn't think Tain could possibly have a weapon — the pry tool was still under the mattress by the loose panels. But Julian was suddenly absolutely convinced that this man, elderly and unfit and unsound of heart though he was, could kill him right now if he wished to.

"Sit down and show some respect for your elders!" Tain snapped, a fine mist of spittle shooting from his mouth.

Julian sat hard upon the bench, too astonished and too alarmed to argue or resist. His knees gave out willingly, even though it was still more terrifying to see Tain towering over him like a diving sinoraptor.

"If you don't want me to treat you," Julian said, exerting a tremendous effort to keep his voice steady and level. The hoarseness probably worked in his favour just now, emphasizing that he was not making a challenge. "I am willing to let the matter rest. A patient has the right to refuse care."

"This isn't about my  _heart_ , boy!" Tain spat. "When I want to talk about that, we will. This is about  _you_  and your suicidal need to prove yourself some kind of hero!"

Julian did not know what to say. He blinked blankly at Tain, trying to make sense of the words.

"You need to stop antagonizing the Vorta," said Tain, his tone still sharp, his words clipped and brisk. "You have been drawing attention to yourself from the moment you awoke in this forsaken place, and it needs to stop. For over a year, we've been working to prove ourselves unworthy of special attention, beneath the notice of the guards,  _complete nonentities_  in the eyes of that posturing little serpent. Yes, even the Klingon!" he cried, as if Julian had made some move to protest. "Do you think he would lie even as low as he does without my prompting?"

Tain's eyes narrowed and he leaned in, prodding Julian's collarbone with a finger that suddenly looked far longer and bonier than it ever had before.

"And in seven days, you have been called into his office three times. You have attacked the Jem'Hadar while they disciplined a prisoner. You have spoken out during the count, and worse, you have encouraged  _others_  to speak out as well. You tried to charge off in the middle of a meal, you jump into the arena at every opportunity, you  _argue_  with Ikat'ika about General Martok's fitness for combat. You are insolent, you are impudent, and  _you are drawing attention to yourself_."

Tain had been leaning in nearer and nearer as he spoke, jabbing at Julian's clavicle with his hand to emphasize each point. Now he broke off and marched back down the room, gesticulating broadly.

"Why do you think they didn't wake you?" he demanded. "I  _told_ them not to wake you! Oh, I had some very heart-wrenching things to say about the rigours of torture and how you needed your rest, but the truth is I knew you'd go out  _there_  again, and make a fuss — quarrel with the First a second time, protest and complain and finally interfere!"

He was pacing back and forth now, like an orator warming to his theme.

"And all that wouldn't matter at all, if you were just another Starfleet officer, one more intrepid explorer skipping across the Galaxy in search of  _adventure_!" Tain declaimed. "One lone human in a prison full of his enemies, making himself obnoxious because he imagines it's the manifestation of some half-hatched Federation value like… oh, what? Let me think… social justice? Civil disobedience? Protection of the weak and disenfranchised?"

He listed these as though citing some absurd fairy tale, flicking his hand to cast each one away. Julian's brows furrowed with disgusted bewilderment.

"Yes," he said forcefully, almost bitterly. "Yes, of course. All of those things. Those, and the need to resist against an adversary that—"

" _We are resisting_!" Tain hissed, and he had never looked more lizard-like than when he whirled to glare at Julian again. "All of us, resisting in the only way that means anything. Engineering an  _escape_ : an actual, tangible goal, not just fumbling gallantry. And every time you draw the Vorta's eye, you bring unwanted scrutiny on this barracks."

 _Oh_. Julian understood now. It was a variation of what he had been thinking this morning. The need to stand fast, defiant, had to bend to expediency: to the need to keep himself alive, and largely unharmed, so that he could outlast the wait for rescue and get out to warn Captain Sisko and the others. Tain's own goals didn't stretch in that particular direction, but the aim was fundamentally the same.

"I haven't done anything to bring attention to myself since I found out what you're doing," Julian tried to explain. "When I spoke out during the count, I was—"

"It doesn't matter!" snarled Tain. His exasperation and disgust were beginning to blunt the edge of his menace. He swooped in on Julian again, but this time he was not terrifying, only bombastic. "You may not have  _done_  anything in two days, but you're still drawing untoward attention. You're going to keep doing it, too, because even if I can curb your damned tongue I would have to break every bone in that slender body just to keep you from charging in to rescue the next Romulan with a nosebleed. It's an unacceptable risk. You may be a  _material asset to the unit_  in the opinion of our redoubtable Major Kalenna, but in my mind you are a liability, boy. And in my time, I knew what to do with liabilities."

It was an empty threat, and they both knew it. Tain had pressed too far, and he had lost his capacity to inspire terror. Now that Julian knew the source of his rage, it was far less alarming. None of the vituperative relish in his voice could win back the fear.

"Perhaps we can use it to our advantage," said Julian, hoping he sounded shrewd despite his vocal disadvantages. "There are going to be times when you need a diversion, someone to distract the guards while you get out of the wall, or to draw fire for some other reason."

He realized too late that here,  _drawing fire_  might prove a little too literal.

Tain tilted back his head, looking down the bridge of his crested nose at Julian. His expression was one of cunning pensiveness and rapid calculation. "There's something in that," he lilted, and he once more sounded like the Enabran Tain Julian had first met in a well-appointed house in the Arawath Colony. "You're cleverer than you look, Julian Subatoi Bashir. Cleverer by far."

He leaned in again, but this time without the menace or the theatrics. Somehow, he was more frightening this way, with the paternal smile playing on his grey lips and the jolly glint in his eyes. He tilted his head to one side.

"But if you make trouble for trouble's sake again," he cooed; "I promise you, you'll live to regret it."

Julian's unease dissolved. He saw now how pathetic a spectacle Tain made, his power all but gone, trying to exert the influence he had of old. "I'll do what I can," he said, tiredly acquiescent. "I'll try to avoid making trouble, but I won't let it keep me from caring for the people who need me. And I'm doing it because it's the best thing for all of us, the best way to ensure our escape. Not because I fear you. I don't fear you, Tain. I'm sorry."

He was sorry, just a little. Not apologetic, but sympathetic. He knew the loss of his fear would take something away from this old man and he regretted that, but he couldn't change it.

Tain studied him for a moment, then nodded resolutely. "I've had a word with a few people of influence among the other barracks," he said. "There won't be a repetition of today's little performance from any well-meaning rebel. Deyos can keep us out there until doomsday, but no one is going to correct the count again.  _Especially_  not you."

Julian didn't need those instructions. He had learned that lesson on his own, dearly bought by five hellish hours on his knees. Still, he nodded. "All right," he agreed.

"And if you're going to keep treating the prisoners who're defeated in the circle, use some common sense and restraint," said Tain.

"I'll try," Julian promised. It was the best he could do.

"And if the Vorta calls you in for another 'private session', no more petty larceny," Tain concluded. "It's too great a risk."

Julian didn't think that stealing the stylus had been too great a risk, at all. The sharp edge of the prying tool did much more damage than necessary for a simple blood-screening, and the risk of infection would be far higher if they kept goring themselves in the name of security. But he didn't argue.

"Unless I get the chance to steal some medical supplies, I agree," he said.

Tain shot him a sharp, irritated look, but then relented. "You really are one of the most singleminded people I've ever met," he mused. "What does Garak see in you?"

"Perhaps he appreciates passion in all its forms, even the ones he doesn't understand," said Julian. His voice was giving out again, and his voice cracked over the second clause. He was sure it  _was_  just his voice, and not the thought of his friend back on Deep Space Nine.

"Hmm. Garak always was depressingly simple in his way," said Tain regretfully. He took a deep breath, poised as if to cough, then reconsidered and swallowed the urge. He saw Julian's watchful expression, and he smiled. "Oh, we're not going to talk about my heart tonight," he said. "Some other time, perhaps. You'll just have to wait."

"However shall I bear the disappointment?" Julian said wryly.

Tain twitched his lips appreciatively at this. He sauntered to Julian's side and clapped his shoulder with a cupped palm. "Keep that sense of humour," he advised. "It'll serve you better than the stiff neck. But Doctor?"

One eye widened queryingly, and Julian found himself looking up in anticipation of some final salvo.

"If you  _really_  don't fear me," said Tain conversationally; "perhaps you should."

Then he strolled away, slapping the door panel with a flourish as he went.

 _(fade_ )


	21. The March of Time

_Note: In which Stoplight Delight retcons the continuity contradictions created by the dialogue in "Inquisition" by adjusting an unfounded assumption. You're all very welcome._

**Part IV, Act IV: The March of Time**

When the door was sealed at curfew, the others settled down to sleep. Julian tried at first to do the same, but it was pointless. His brain had gone through all of the complex chemical processes that regulated sleep and wakefulness, and cycled through the necessary stages of slumber at least a couple of times. He didn't remember dreaming, but he must have entered rapid-eye-movement sleep for an adequate interval because he felt wide awake, alert and keen-witted. Ordinarily all of this would have been a good thing, reinvigorating for his mind and body. At home, he would have taken advantage even of the unorthodox hour, burying himself in his research or surprising the nurse on the fourth watch with an unexpected night off so he could recatalogue the dispensary. Or popping in at Quark's for a quick drink before the Ferengi called last orders.

Here, however, bereft of duties, distractions, diversions, computer access, laboratory equipment, PADDs, or even a book, he had absolutely no external source of mental stimulation. There were no deadlines to meet, nothing to accomplish, nothing constructive to fill the time. Julian did his prescribed physical therapy, replaced the compression dressing on his knee, organized his cache of dirty bandages, and then wished he hadn't because it left his hands feeling filthy. He settled on his cot, back to the wall, his good leg tucked up to his chest and his healing one stretched out towards the middle of the room, and tried to resign himself to the fact that there was nothing to do.

He grappled with that idea for about five minutes before he started trying to diagnose his cellmates by the timbre of their breathing. Parvok's thin, whistling inhalations were most likely an indication that he had larger-than-average adenoids. It probably wasn't pathological, given his approximate age. Martok's snoring was heavier than usual tonight, but that was hardly surprising: he wasn't getting a good seal on his lips with one side of his mouth swollen and battered. Now and then, Kalenna made soft, tremulous noises deep in her throat. They were not quite whimpers, but Julian surmised she was dreaming—and not very pleasant dreams, at that.

He couldn't tell if the hiss and whoosh of the Breen's respiration apparatus was normal or abnormal, healthy or unhealthy, having no benchmark for comparison. And then there was Enabran Tain.

Julian watched him for a long time, a slumbering hulk under the coarse, inadequate blanket. The whirring machinations of his labyrinthine mind had slowed in slumber, and he looked once more innocuous, even sympathetic. He was an old man, ground down by hardship and slow malnutrition, exhausted by the day's labours and lost in sleep.

It was easy to forget, looking at him now, the legacy of terror and ruined lives he had left in his wake: the torture, the assassinations, the hell of exile to which Tain had hesitated to condemn no one, not even his most faithful servant. It was possible to overlook the deaths he had ordered or condoned, the atrocities committed by his hand or in his name, and the countless worlds that had lived in fear of the power of the Obsidian Order. Julian was even struggling to recall his own feelings of cornered horror earlier that evening, when he had been given an unprecedented glimpse of the monster behind the mask.

He thought about Tain's last words to him before leaving the barracks to relieve himself. They were the most recent words Tain had spoken to him at all, in fact, for he had returned much subdued and said his goodnights only to Martok and Kalenna.  _If you really don't fear me, perhaps you should_. Julian could not help but wonder if this was nothing more than a final bit of posturing, an attempt to save face by the strength of old habit… or if Tain's menace truly could run deeper even than what he had unveiled today.

Julian did not doubt that the old man could have him killed, if he so wished. The other Cardassians in the camp feared him enough to obey him at whiles, and there were some (like the Glinn who had been Trel's partner in crime) who would probably have been glad enough to murder Julian just for the satisfaction of it, or to break up the monotony of the days. But death was a poor threat here, where the Jem'Hadar held it in their eyes every second of every day. He supposed Tain could withdraw his protection, which would put Julian in a very uncomfortable position. But now he had the loyalty and friendship of others: Kalenna, Martok, even the Breen. He was not the lone, lame, helpless human he had been on his first day, still disoriented, still drugged, and struggling just to make sense of his surroundings. And short of betraying him to the Vorta, which would only expose the escape plan to the risk of Julian breaking under interrogation, there did not seem to be anything else Tain could possibly do to him here.

In any case, he could not live in terror of Tain, any more than he could sustain a constant level of vigilant paranoia about the Founders. Life had to go on, such as it was, and that meant that Julian couldn't dwell on this any longer.

He thought about Tain's heart instead. Not the metaphysical heart that humans used as an allegory for the seat of passion, mercy and desire, but the actual machine of muscle and nerve and sinew that powered his circulatory system and sustained his life. Julian envisioned the complex anatomy of the Cardassian heart: four chambers, like a human heart, with the right side feeding the lungs and the left supplying the body. But the similarities quickly dissipated from there. The atria were larger in relation to the ventricles, and the ventricles themselves were more powerful than the human equivalent. The normal ejection fraction was higher, too: Cardassian hearts were more efficient. The two aortas and the unique arrangement of the valves — five valves, not four — completed an organ that was both intricate and highly evolved. It was perhaps the most powerful and masterful design of any humanoid heart Julian had studied.

But like a high-yield warp core, when something went wrong with the sleek behemoth of the Cardassian heart, small problems could swiftly become catastrophic.

Julian sat for a long time, unmoving, sifting through everything he had ever read on the subject. Garak was uncommonly cagey on the matter of Cardassian physiology, except as concerned trivialities like facial hair. Compared to his effusive discussion of Cardassian literature, history, politics, and, of course, fashion, the meagre tidbits Garak offered about the inner workings of his people's bodies seemed all the more inadequate. Julian had supplemented them with extensive reading — but he had admittedly focused on gross anatomy, neurology, trauma, and infectious disease, all of which had the potential to impact the one Cardassian in his patient population without warning. Gerontology was a weak link in his knowledge. If Julian had ever given it much thought, he supposed he had simply assumed that he wouldn't have the opportunity to put any such information to use for decades, if at all.

Now he cursed his lack of foresight. He recalled something about congestive heart failure in Cardassians, but it was complicated by the twin aortas and the valve between them that could, for reasons lost in the evolutionary quagmire, close off blood flow to the lungs above a certain atmospheric pressure. It seemed like another efficiency measure, this one meant for deep-water diving, but there was just one paradox: Cardassians were not amphibious.

And there was no telling, at least with the information at hand, whether heart failure was Tain's problem. Julian's armchair diagnosis of angina was all very well, but the causes of angina were many. As for the solutions, every single one of them required some form of sophisticated medical intervention: surgery, ultrasonic therapy, laser ablation, medication. He couldn't do any of it with two bare hands, a roll of torn blanket, and an insufferable Federation disposition.

Julian scrubbed his face with his hands, sighing in frustration. He let his fingers rake up into his hair. His scalp was itching, and he scratched it vigorously. Then he latched upon the welcome distraction of trying to tease the knots out of his hair with his fingers. The strands were oily, and his fingernails collected crescents of shed skin as they raked over his skull. It was disgusting, he  _felt_  disgusting, but the pleasure of the rudimentary massage was remarkable. Julian didn't stop until he'd found and conquered every last tangle, and the ache in his shoulders, still sore from the morning's exertions, deepened distractingly.

He kneaded at them for a while instead, rolling his head slowly from side to side so that he could stretch his neck. The night was crawling on around him, and now that he'd been sitting relatively immobile for a while, he was beginning to feel the chill of the room. He had returned Martok's blanket to him, and the Klingon was lying under it now. Julian took his own and bundled it around his shoulders like a shawl, gathering the ends about his arm and hugging them to his chest.

His stomach gurgled disconsolately. He was ravenously hungry. Deyos had not succeeded in depriving him of water, but the want of his miserable daily meal was proving an effective punishment. Julian felt a wave of dizzy nausea, and closed his eyes against it. He was trying very hard not to think about food. He was not succeeding.

Yigrish cream pie, smooth and sweet with the unexpected cinnamon-like bite of the crumbled crust. Hot buttered scones, flaky enough to melt on the tongue, with the rich tang of Bajoran moba jam — his particular morning favourite. Mapa bread spread with warm Camembert cheese. A dish of pasta and grilled vegetables in a pesto sauce, warm and savoury and filling. A good old-fashioned steak with a steaming baked potato beside it. Even Starfleet combat rations would have been welcome just now.

The cold, glutinous slop the Dominion served its prisoners wasn't exactly the stuff of fantasies, but Julian could happily have devoured a trayful of that, even, if given half a chance.

He screwed his eyes tightly closed, trying to exert some control over his stomach. But his talent for modulating his heart rate, altering his blood pressure, slowing his breathing, and even changing the rhythm of his blinking reflex with scarcely a thought did not seem to extend to this. He couldn't stop the sickening clenching, and he couldn't shut out the yearning for something to eat.

Julian had no way of knowing how long ago he'd had his last real meal back on Meezan IV, but he'd been subsisting on the prison rations for a week now. He didn't know the caloric content of half a kilogram of that mixture of grain and legumes, but he did know it wasn't enough to maintain the prisoners' body mass — and it certainly didn't provide the ballast or the energy to carry them through to the next mealtime. Every night he had gone to bed hungry, and every morning he waited ravenously for his share. And now, more than a day and a half since he'd last been fed, he was beginning to feel crazed with hunger.

And just how long  _was_  a day in this place, anyway? The two litres of water they were issued should have been enough to stave off dehydration symptoms in a healthy human whose activity level was largely sedentary in a cool environment. Yet the rapidity with which Julian had slid back into a misery of overpowering thirst made it clear that he had been hovering right on the brink beforehand. His flank pain was back, too, although he had been sipping faithfully at the water the others had given him. Two litres per twenty-six hours should have been enough water, but it wasn't. So either there was some other factor at play, or a Dominion day was longer than a Bajoran one.

No matter how long Julian slept each night, he was always exhausted long before curfew. The unstructured hours between the end of each day's matches in the arena, and the locking of the barracks door stretched in an interminable desert of time. He'd put that down to the lack of stimulation, but maybe that wasn't the whole truth. He hadn't tried to keep track of the time for more than a couple of hours at a stretch. It was a distracting use of brain power, and it made him miserable to use it when other people,  _natural people,_ couldn't, and anyhow it was so easy to lose his place. But he was beginning to think he needed to try.

There was no point in starting now, when he wasn't really certain how much time had elapsed since curfew. Julian had exhausted the productive trains of thought, and he couldn't muster the heart for inventive distraction. Sleep was still unobtainable, and he couldn't get up and pace without disturbing the others' sleep. So he settled back against the wall again and hugged the blanket to himself and tried not to think about his stomach. It wasn't easy. Indeed, it was apparently impossible. He seemed to be getting colder, too.

_(fade)_

Julian finally drifted off to sleep, but he did not seem to float very far before a firm, slender hand shook him to wakefulness. He blinked up blearily at Major Kalenna. She looked more strained than usual, and as he watched, two faint tendrils of steam curled out of her nostrils, billowing on the air.

He blinked, thinking it might be a trick of the unreliable light. Then he drew a hand across his eyes. His fingers were like ice.

"I thought I was imagining it," he said groggily, hitching his elbow up beneath him. He looked at his hands as if the chill were a thing he could see. "It's colder, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Kalenna. She reached across her body to rub absently at her left arm. "It's night."

He didn't understand. Why had she wakened him, if it was still nighttime? But then the familiar wheezing clang shook the air as the barracks door opened. Parvok was going out, bound for the foul room at the end of the pod. The doors were unlocked: it was morning, or what passed for morning in this place.

Julian sat up slowly, aware of a dozen minor pains in his back and thighs. He was still drawing the wages of yesterday's punishment. He was shivering, and he gathered his blanket more tightly around himself. Before, he'd estimated the ambient temperature of the prison at fifteen degrees Celsius. Now, he thought it couldn't be higher than six or seven.

"Why…" he began. And then his brain kicked back into high warp and he understood. "The asteroid," he said. "It's moved into the shadow of the planet." Kalenna hadn't been talking about the constructed night of the prison camp, but the orbital night of the satellite it sat on.

She nodded. "Eight days in the light of this system's star, eight days without it."

"And it gets colder?" Julian asked, perplexed. "Isn't the life support system supposed to maintain a steady temperature?"

"Tain theorizes that it's set to maintain a steady power output instead," said Kalenna.

That couldn't be. Julian had never been the most assiduous of astrophysics students, but he'd passively absorbed everything taught at the introductory level at the Academy. On a satellite without an atmosphere, with nothing to insulate the barren rock or equalize thermal energy distribution, temperatures could vary vastly between areas in daylight and areas in shadow. Those differences were measured in hundreds of degrees, not nine or ten.

"They're doing it on purpose," he said. A shudder of cold ran up his spine. Once he was moving, it wouldn't be so bad. But just now, he was freezing. "God knows why."

Kalenna made a low noise of disgust. "We need to get ready. It's not long 'til roll call."

Julian got to his feet, and he did so too quickly. His head swam and his vision filled with black stars and he swayed where he stood. Swiftly Kalenna thrust herself against him, bracing him with a shoulder and grabbing hold of his far arm so he did not fall. The room tilted perilously, whirling in a slow ballet of misery, but when the fainting fit passed Julian was still on his feet, and the Romulan Major was looking up at him worriedly.

"I'm fine," he said. There was a sheen of perspiration on his brow and down the back of his neck. It made him feel colder still. "I just stood up too fast."

Kalenna didn't say a word. She stepped back from him carefully, her hands lingering longer than the rest of her as if she were prepared to catch him if he faltered again. Then she reached to take the blanket from his shoulders.

Julian wanted to protest: he needed the extra layer, and his back felt suddenly frigid and exposed without it. It was all very well to rate a Starfleet uniform for body temperature homeostasis as low as minus fifteen degrees without additional garments, but in practice that meant you still had to shiver to stave off hypothermia. He rubbed his own arms with cold hands as Kalenna, swiftly and efficiently, made his bed for him.

"Let's go," she said, moving for the door. "Are you going to be able to stand for the count?"

For a moment, he wondered if she thought humans got lightheaded in the cold. Then he decided that she must have realized it was inanition that had led to the dizzy spell, and of course there was nothing any of them could do about that until the ration call in four hours' time. There was no point in talking about it.

"I'll have to be, won't I?" he said, following her. She slapped the control panel and stepped over the threshold, but did not immediately clear the way for him. With her back squarely to Julian and her face turned towards the atrium, she spoke.

"Be careful of the Cardassians," she warned. "They will seem slower than usual, clumsy. But they are dangerous in the cold."

Then she walked on.

 _(fade_ )

The atrium was filled with more activity than usual. People were pacing, most as briskly as they could. Kalenna joined the circuit of moving bodies, trying to walk off the night's chill. The Romulans all seemed to be moving with brisk efficiency, but the meandering Cardassians looked intoxicated. They seemed incapable of staying in a straight line, and most of them were hanging their heads as if they were too heavy even for the stoutly reinforced necks. They wandered aimlessly, as if they knew that movement would help to warm them but they lacked the drive for it.

Julian drew near the shadow of the nearest pillar, where Martok stood. He was the only stationary prisoner in the whole vaulted space, though the guards stood stoically in their usual places.

"Good morning," said Julian. He braced his shoulder against the pylon, feeling another unsteady wave of dizziness. "Or should I say good night?"

Martok snorted, but the sound held a note of amusement. "It is a clever tactic," he said. "The Cardassians make up a third of the prison population. Eight days of cold is not enough to kill them, but it keeps them apathetic."

"And the rest of us merely miserable?" asked Julian. Klingons had a higher basal body temperature than humans, and they had a hypothalamic regulatory system that Cardassians could only dream of, but they did not like the cold.

Martok growled and stamped one booted foot. Someone had helped him back into his armour, and he was once again wearing all his worldly possessions on his back. "That is one way to describe it," he agreed.

Julian's hands weren't warming as quickly as the rest of him. He'd been right about moving around: it helped, and even the short walk from the barracks had made a marked improvement. He shuffled from one foot to the other and tucked his palms up under his arms, the warmest place he could put them, at least in polite company.

"The asteroid's orbit is sixteen camp days," Julian said. "Eight in the light, eight in the shadow. Yes?"

"Yes," muttered Martok absently. He was watching the ebb and flow of bodies around them.

"And how long is a camp day?" asked Julian. "It's more than twenty-six hours, isn't it?"

"Twenty-six?" Martok frowned at him perplexedly. "I thought a Federation day was twenty-four hours. Or am I mistaken?"

"No, you're right," said Julian. "I'm used to using the Bajoran Standard Day. Because of the station."

Martok frowned at him, but seemed to accept this. He looked away again, seeking out Kalenna with his eyes. She had fallen into step with another Romulan, one Julian did not recognize. "She asked them once, the guards," said Martok. "The rest of us were not inclined to wonder. It seemed to make little difference to our lives. But the Major is like you, Doctor: boundlessly curious in her own way. So she approached the Jem'Hadar."

"And?" asked Julian fervidly. He felt that if he could just get a firm answer to this question, his new, stilted life would make measurably more sense.

"And she received a meaningless answer for her pains," spat Martok. "'Two regeneration cycles' was what she was told. When she pressed for further information, she was rebuffed. Discourteously rebuffed."

"The guard struck her," Julian translated.

Martok tossed back his head in the affirmative. "And for nothing. Regeneration cycles… what are those? It is a well-known fact that the Jem'Hadar do not sleep. If Deyos does, he makes no show of it. Who is to say what length of day the Dominion prefers?"

But Julian knew. "It has nothing to do with the Jem'Hadar," he said, the pieces falling into place. "It's based on the physiological needs of the Founders. They need to periodically return to their liquid state. If they don't, their morphogenic structure breaks down, and that can be fatal."

On Deep Space Nine, before the Great Link had judged him unworthy of membership in their species because he had killed one of his own kind to save the crew of the  _Defiant_ , Odo had been obliged to regenerate once every sixteen hours. He had reverted to a shimmering amber fluid in the comfort — Julian supposed that was the right word — of an ornate Bajoran bucket. As his shapeshifting abilities had grown more sophisticated, the time he needed to spend regenerating had steadily decreased before plateauing at about an hour per cycle.

"Two regeneration cycles would be thirty-two hours," said Julian. But that didn't account for the time at rest, of course. "No, thirty-four.  _Longer_?" That hardly seemed possible.

"It's thirty-four," said Tain, coming up behind. His abrupt approach startled Julian, but he managed to keep from jumping out of his skin. At the Doctor's questioning look, the old Cardassian smiled. "There's a timing unit on my device," he whispered. "It was one of the first things I checked. The Major is not the only questioning mind among us."

He was back to a conversational volume as he said this last. Martok looked at him in disgusted annoyance.

"And why did you not tell her that before she interrogated the guard?" he demanded.

Tain shrugged. "She never asked  _me_ ," he said innocently.

Martok was about to retort when the alarm blasted its four piercing bleats, and everyone hastened into the four straight lines. Julian pushed himself off of the pillar, momentarily unsteady. His stomach clenched and his head swam, but he shuffled to take his place at the end of the front row.

"Not there, not today," said Martok. He took Julian by the shoulder with his good hand, and steered the human to his right instead. "Tain, get up here: stand at his other side."

Tain's lips pursed petulantly. "I prefer to keep a low profile. You know that," he said sourly.

Despite the obligatory protest, he did what the warrior instructed, and soon Julian found himself flanked by Tain and Martok. They snapped to attention, and he wearily did the same. It did his back and neck no favours, and the ache in his hips and knees seemed to deepen almost immediately. Julian spared a fragile, fleeting hope that they would not be kept standing for too long, but of course it was not to be.

It took five attempts for Deyos to get as far as fifty. By the time he even approached the end of the first double line, the prisoners had been on their feet for almost an hour and a half. Julian had a grinding frontal headache, and a hot knot burned behind his breastbone: acid from his empty stomach, oozing up through his cardiac sphincter. Despite the chill in the air, his body was slick with sweat under his standard-issue garments. Before, he had been impatient with his body's pathetic response to what had seemed like an uncomfortable but not especially draconian fast. But if he had indeed been without food for almost sixty-six hours instead of not-quite-two of the days he was used to, the weakness and misery made a great deal more sense.

"Eighty-six," said Deyos. "Eighty-eight. My, you  _do_  look cold, don't you? It's a pity Cardassians can't regulate their body temperature independently."

Julian blinked, trying to make his eyes focus on the prisoner who had drawn this taunt from the Vorta. He couldn't quite do it. His vision was blurred, and he felt a sickening wave of heat rippling through his body. He was sure he was drifting to port, but he couldn't quite remember how to regain his balance.

His left shoulder struck something solid and unmoving. Down past his hip, calloused fingers closed on his wrist, gripping him stalwartly. Martok inched nearer, bracing Julian's body with his own without ever relaxing out of the rigid formal stance demanded of the prisoners.

Julian knew he was tilted to the left, his shoulders off-kilter. The guards hadn't noticed yet: they were following Deyos back down to the end of the line to begin the count again. But they were sure to see it soon. He tried to straighten up, to ease himself off of Martok's shoulder, and to stand under his own power, but he couldn't quite find the strength.

Someone was tugging on his other sleeve, pulling him surreptitiously to the right. "A little further this way, General," Tain muttered out of the side of his mouth. "We've got a gap over here."

Then Julian was shuffling sideways, a tiny half-step, as Martok nudged him nearer to Tain. Abruptly there was pressure on his right shoulder, too: another steady body buoying him up. Tain gave Julain's arm one last hard jerk, and his shoulders levelled out. He wasn't standing at attention, not really, but at a distance it was probably a passible imitation. The famished presyncope didn't abate, but he could no longer wobble now.

Julian let himself hover in an indistinct haze, hearing but not listening to the Vorta's droning count. No one had dared to correct him yet. It seemed that the example he had made of the human and whatever threats Tain had passed along had done their work. Julian's limbs felt heavy, and even breathing seemed difficult, and the only thing that seemed to have any reliable hold on his thoughts was that he was hungry, unbearably hungry, and that food would make this all melt away.

"You've got to stand on your own," Tain hissed urgently, a vague span of time later. "They'll turn around in a minute."

Julian shook himself, swallowing a disoriented snort. He forced the weight he'd been letting the others support back onto his legs. They felt rubbery beneath him, but they held. Martok moved a little to the left, and Tain a little to the right. This opened a narrow gap between Julian's shoulders and theirs, and left his sleeves and the deltoids beneath suddenly exposed to the cold air again. With an obdurate determination to hold his own, Julian squared his shoulders and held his head high, even though it reeled.

"One hundred four," Deyos said, flicking a finger at Martok and whoever stood behind him. The Vorta sauntered to the next man in the row, and smiled unctuously. " _Well_  now, Doctor! Thirsty, are we? A little light in the head?"

It was hunger, not thirst, but he was right about the second half. Julian blinked at him heavily, and said nothing.

"Have you learned your lesson about insolence yet?" Deyos asked, his lips briefly pouting in a grotesque parody of sympathy.

Julian's resolve to stay silent wavered. This was a test, he realized, and if he made the wrong decision here he wouldn't be sacrificing his chance at valedictorian and his choice of any posting in the fleet. The stakes this time were much higher: if he made the wrong decision here, he would be kept back from ration call again.

But what did the Vorta want from him? What was the right answer? He wasn't thinking clearly: his brain was starved of glucose that his liver could no longer supply.  _Acute depletion of glycogen stores, leading to transitory hypoglycemia_ , a part of his brain that was still functioning normally but that was completely useless in his current circumstances recited.  _Your body will switch over to ketosis soon, and then you'll start to feel better._

That wasn't going to happen, Julian admonished the know-it-all voice, because he was going to say the right thing and he was going to draw his ration of mush today and he was going to be damned grateful for it. But still, he didn't know what the Vorta wanted him to say.

"I asked if you've learned your lesson, Doctor," Deyos said, his voice warbling a warning. " _Have_  you?"

Julian couldn't puzzle out the solution to the equation before him, so he simply let his training take over. One of the first things cadets in any professional stream were taught at Starfleet Academy was the etiquette of the chain of command. He fell back on it now, when higher reasoning failed him.

"Yes, sir," he said. He had meant to say it crisply, but it came out heavy, hoarse and slightly slurred.

"Oh. Oh, you have?" Deyos smiled condescendingly. "I'm ever so glad to hear that, Doctor. It's been a wearying couple of days for the both of us, I'm sure."

The triumphal gleam in his eyes seared into Julian's chest, scorching his pride. But it seemed he had found the right answer, and there was some satisfaction in that, at least. The glow of that faded a little when Deyos threw up his hands, looked around in cartoonish resignation, and said, "How silly of me. I've forgotten where we were!"

He waited five seconds too long before restarting the count, daring the rabble-rouser to speak up. Julian held his tongue. It wasn't just self-preservation, he told himself, trying to take some comfort in that. It was expediency, sound strategy, and a fulfilment of his promise to Tain that he would dial back the rebellion as much as he could.

"Two," Deyos said at last, pointing in Martok's direction. His index finger thumped into Julian's chest next, boring uncomfortably into the fifth intercostal space. "Four." He moved down the line. "Six. Eight…"

 _(fade_ )

When at last the count was over and the prisoners were given leave to disperse, Julian sagged where he stood. His legs were trembling and his vision danced with hot black pulsars. He had been fighting off the fainting spell for what seemed like an eternity, and he was certain it was going to take him now. His skin was burning, and perspiration trickled into his eyes. But someone had him by the arm, herding him backwards until his shoulder-blades struck the nearest wall. Julian slid down its cold metal surface gratefully, sinking to the floor and drawing up his knees so that he could rest his hands against them and bury his face in his palms.

Whoever had led him to this bulwark of support was crouching over him now, and someone was warding the other prisoners away, keeping them at a distance so that Julian could catch his breath without fear of being stepped on. As he gradually came back to himself, he remembered that was a real risk today, with the Cardassians staggering drunkenly around.

The horrible heat drained from his skin as his blood pressure stabilized and he clawed his way back from the brink of his swoon. It left him shivering, drenched with frigid perspiration, but it was a decided improvement nonetheless. Slowly Julian slid his hands away from his face and tucked his arms in between thighs and chest so he could hug his ribs for warmth. His head hung heavily between his shoulders for half a minute longer, and then he raised it slowly, looking around.

Martok was at his side, right leg squatting and left knee on the floor. His right hand was drumming on his armoured knee. Tain stood on the other side, looking outward from Julian's position. It was he who had been redirecting traffic around the obstacle.

"I see you have prevailed," the Klingon said stoutly. Julian thought it was the closest thing to compassion that the warrior knew how to show. "The battles we fight with our own bodies are often the hardest victories."

Julian nodded weakly. "I suppose you're an expert in that," he said, his voice coarse and stinging.

Martok froze for a moment, and then grunted. It wasn't quite a dismissal, but it wasn't a denial, either.

Kalenna came around the corner from their barracks. She had Julian's bottle in her hand, already open. She squatted down beside the General, and offered him the water. Julian reached for it, but his hand was shaking. she shifted her grip to the base of the canteen and supported the weight so that he could guide it to his lips. He drank greedily, feeling the water wash away some of the lingering nausea. His stomach clenched, churned noisily, and then fell quiet. It wanted something more substantial, but it was as aware as the rest of his body of the need for water.

Julian forced himself to stop after the third long draught. Though he desperately wanted more, he had to conserve what was left.

"You might as well drink it," Kalenna said, rocking the bottle enticingly against his palm. "If we have even half an hour to wait until ration call, I'll be surprised."

Julian took the bottle from her, his arms less tremulous now, and held it against his chest. He tipped back his head to rest against the wall and stared up at the immutable industrial contours of the dome far above. There was a curious, cleansing feeling when a fainting spell was past. He was exhausted and chilled, and he felt like he could happily sleep for a year, but he felt somehow purified.

He collected himself slowly while the others stood guard. Eventually, Parvok came back with his arms overflowing with empty bottles. They were shared around, two to a prisoner. When the call came to assemble for rations, Julian was able to stand with only a little help from the two Romulans. Martok had moved at once to assist, but Julian had rebuffed him in his sternest Doctor Voice. He was still a little shaky on his feet as he took his place in the meal line, but he drew his share of water and the grey, indifferent food without incident and gladly settled down on the floor with the others.

As he scooped up his first fingerful of stewed mash and devoured it like some kind of savage animal, Julian reflected that he had never in his life been more grateful for the barest means of survival.

 _(fade_ )


	22. Striking a Bargain

**Part IV, Act V: Striking a Bargain**

By the time the Jem'Hadar gathered for that afternoon's bout in the arena, Julian was feeling more like himself again. His stomach was unsettled and still far from satiated — he hadn't even hesitated to lick his plate today, scrounging every last morsel of his meagre meal, and still his belly wasn't full — but his hands were steady again and the strength had returned to his legs. After his all-but-sleepless night and the ordeal of the count, he would have liked to retreat to his cot. Bundling up in the blanket, thin though it was, sounded good, too: his undergarments were damp with perspiration, and they chilled him to the bone. It took a concerted effort not to shiver.

But Julian refrained, and when the sound of the guards gathering filtered through the heavy door of Barracks 6, he gathered his bandages and went out. He took his customary place just beyond the loose circle of Jem'Hadar, as inconspicuous as he could make himself in the deep shadow of the pylon. Silently he watched as a Cardassian was led out into the ring.

He did not look like a worthwhile object for the Jem'Hadar's cruel sport. He was narrow-boned and perilously thin, the ridges of his auxiliary vertebrae standing out starkly under flaking grey skin. A purplish sore was blossoming at one corner of his mouth, and his eyes were deeply sunken in their shadowed sockets. What struck Julian most of all was the way he moved, sluggish and loose-limbed with a dazed vulnerability that made him look like a boy pulled unexpectedly from the classroom instead of a hardened operative of the Obsidian Order. He must have been an operative who served outside the military, too, for he wasn't wearing any armour.

"Observe the Cardassian," Ikat-ika announced in his usual stentorian way. "Note how the cold makes him slow. Vulnerable. When we face his people in combat, we will have a considerable advantage in intemperate climates. But as we have learned, the cold also makes Cardassians adversarial, irrational, unpredictable. Begin!"

The Jem'Hadar squaring off against this ill-equipped prisoner was broad-shouldered and very quick. He dove in right away, swinging a tightly controlled fist. It connected with the Cardassian's jaw before he even managed to make his first evading movement. His head snapped to one side in a way that would have left Julian afraid for the state of a single-spined neck. But the Cardassian simply tilted his head once in each direction, shaking off the blow, and took a slow side-step to the right as the Jem'Hadar struck again.

This time, the fist struck the Cardassian's shoulder, and he took a stumbling half-step backward. His eyes still had the glazed, half-drunken look that all of his people — all except Tain — had been wearing during the count that morning. But when the Jem'Hadar lunged again, the Cardassian struck.

His legs were still moving with their lumbering, loose-kneed gait, but his arm flew out like a tentacle. He clipped the Jem'Hadar on the side of the head not with his fist, but with the bony protuberance of his wrist. The  _thump_  of the impact would have been audible to someone with far less attuned ears than Julian's, and the Jem'Hadar staggered for a moment, disoriented.

It went on like that for some time. The Cardassian would take a blow, reel momentarily, and then right himself. He would sway or stagger or meander out of the path of the Jem'Hadar, misjudge, and be struck again. And then, in an apparent fit of blazing rage, he would strike back to smite his opponent — at first only with his hands, but as the pace of the contest quickened, with his knees or boots as well.

It was almost like watching Bolian boxing, only without the boisterous belly-laughs that followed every blow in that sport. Soon, the Cardassian was bleeding from a gash above the eye, and the Jem'Hadar's lip was rent open. The watching guards were rapt with anticipation, and though they stopped short of calling out encouragement, they were goading the contenders on with hungry eyes. Julian thought it strange that the Jem'Hadar did not seem to be trying to throw the Cardassian, as others had done in previous bouts. But then the guard lost sight of his strategy and tried it, and Julian saw why he had avoided it earlier.

As the Jem'Hadar lunged into his attacking crouch, arms outstretched to seize his opponent about the waist, the Cardassian came suddenly to life. All traces of hypothermic apathy vanished in one sudden, coiled leap of feral vengeance. The lean body evaded the grasp of the Jem'Hadar, not by retreating but by pivoting around him. The Cardassian's hands closed, one on the Jem'Hadar's elbow and one on his neck, he surged forward, head outthrust and long neck stretched to its limit. His teeth were bared, and as Julian watched, transfixed and horrified, the prisoner's jaw clamped shut and he  _bit_  the gill-like tissue flap on the side of the Jem'Hadar's neck.

General Martok claimed the Dominion's soldiers bore the breaking of an arm with nothing more than an outrush of air. This Jem'Hadar, however, screamed: a noise of outrage and consternation to curdle the blood. He whipped in towards his attacker, and Julian could hear the sickening tear of flesh as the Cardassian's teeth ripped out a chunk of skin and cartilage in a spray of dark blood.

The Jem'Hadar seized the Cardassian's head, one hand driving hard nails into his brow while the other yanked a fistful of dark, slick hair. The fit of violence and its accompanying deftness were gone, and the Cardassian was too slow to countermand the force as his attacker yanked him sideways and down, slamming his head into an upthrust knee. The  _crack_  of skull on plate armour made Julian cringe sympathetically, and the Cardassian was thrown to the ground.

He struggled to his hands and knees, but his legs gave out like rubber beneath him and his brow struck the stone floor with terrible force. He twitched, making one last effort with his arms, and then lay still.

The First was announcing the victory, but Julian was already trying to plot his course through the minefield of Jem'Hadar, their tensions still high in the wake of the battle. He made good use of his healing and now almost completely sound right knee as he slipped between them, trying to remain innocuous even as he pressed forward towards his patient.

He miscalculated at the last, and bumped shoulders with Fourth Tiratak'nar. The Jem'Hadar reacted with the swift reflexes of a hypervigilant veteran, whipping to the side and seizing Julian's elbows. He lifted as he did so, and Julian was hoisted off his feet os that the toes of his boots skimmed the floor. He felt his eyes go wide with startled alarm, but he kept the rest of his face impassive. Whether because of his attempt to show no fear or for some other reason, the Fourth returned him to the ground, canting his head to one side to fix him with a cold look.

"Watch where you step, prisoner," he admonished sternly, but he released his hold and gave no more violent correction.

"My apologies," said Julian as he side-stepped away. The strange thing was, he actually meant it. He had plowed into the Jem'Hadar, not the other way 'round. If he'd done the same thing on the Promenade, he would have excused himself. Doing so now made him feel civilized, not humiliated. It made him feel more, not less, like a free man.

Tiratak'nar's flinty black eyes followed him into the ring, and Julian was glad again to have two sound legs as he dropped to his knees by the Cardassian. He was unconscious, but breathing. A quick pass of the hands revealed the vertebrae of his neck — all three sets — to be intact, and so Julian got a firm hold on the left shoulder, braced his other hand on the corresponding hip, and rolled him carefully onto his back.

There was no armour to worry about this time, but in any case Julian was not particularly concerned for the state of the man's ribs. From what he had seen, there was no particular reason to be, but in any case there was a far more serious problem at hand.

Blood was streaming down the Cardassian's cheek and trickling in rivulets along the ridges of his brow and eye socket. It was matting in his hair and collecting in his left ear. And it was bubbling in thick, brilliantly red gouts from a wound on the side of his head. The temporal artery had been torn open, and it was spraying blood with each beat of the man's heart.

Julian reached across his patient's body, clapping his palm to the wound and applying firm, frantic pressure. He could feel the shreds of skin and the narrow, ragged wounds against his hand. Their orientation was unmistakable: they were the marks of the guard's nails, raked deep into the thin flesh of the temple. A similar wound on Julian's head would have bled copiously but continuously: minor blood vessels ruptured and spilling out their generous cargo in a steady trickle. This pulsing rivulet was far more serious.

He couldn't get enough pressure on the wound, and so Julian slid his knee against the other side of the Cardassian's skull to keep it from sliding as he adjusted his hold. He needed something absorbent to dress the wound, too, once he finally arrested the bleeding, and the idea of applying the filthy strips of blanket to the deep lacerations was viscerally horrifying. He could already envision the pulp of pus and purulence and disintegrating skin, and his absolute inability to treat it without antiseptics and antibiotics.

He had dropped the rolls of improvised bandage when he had turned the Cardassian, too, and they now lay a metre and a half away, hopelessly out of reach unless he moved his hand. He looked around helplessly, his right hand tilted empty and useless before him. And then he made up his mind and tugged up his left sleeve.

The grey shirt that he wore between his uniform jumpsuit and the Starfleet singlet beneath was designed for durability and versatility. It was lightweight but insulating, and it was woven of a bacteriostatic fibre that was the primary reason that even after so many days Julian did not yet reek like an unwashed orangutang. But the comfortable, adaptable, aseptic fabric also tore very easily. It was something of a joke amongst space station personnel throughout the Federation, but at times like this, it came in handy. Julian didn't know if the designers had deliberately built this feature into the uniforms or not, but a torn sleeve made a ready bandage in desperate situations.

He got a good hold on the snug, stretchy cuff, and ripped a three-inch ring of cloth away. A second tug opened the seam, and he had a strip of thin, absorbent fabric that, if not exactly sterile, was still far cleaner than anything else he had to hand. He folded it hurriedly into a thick pad, his one free hand working deftly, and then lifted his left palm from the Cardassian's brow just long enough to slip the dressing in place.

More blood jetted out between his fingers. It was unnaturally cold, and strangely sticky, but Cardassian blood was the same hemoglobin-red of human blood, and it provoked the same instinctive urgency in Julian. He pressed as firmly as he could, exerting far more force than was usually required to clot a wound, and he prayed that the bleeding would stop.

There was nothing he could do but pray, or hope, or whatever you liked to call it. He didn't have an autosuture or a tube of polymer adhesive. He didn't even have a needle and thread. And he didn't know the per-minute blood volume that flowed through the Cardassian temporal artery. He had no way of knowing if the dam he had his finger in was holding back a duckpond, or the entire Zuiderzee.

He knew he was on his own in this, and yet he still looked around. Most of the Jem'Hadar had dispersed, but the one who had taken down the Cardassian in the arena was getting an examination of his own. First Ikat'ika was prodding the torn neck-flap, eyes narrowed in consideration, while the injured guard stood stock still with his right ear on his shoulder. The First motioned to another Jem'Hadar, who approached and leaned in to give an opinion.

"It is superficial," he said. "No need to trouble the Vorta."

"It is bleeding," the First said. "It must be dressed." He fixed his wounded subordinate with what was apparently the Jem'Hadar equivalent of earnest consolation. "It  _will_  scar," he assured him. "You have received your first mark in combat, for the glory of the Dominion. You have done well this day.  _You!_  Human! Are you capable of dressing this wound?"

Julian could not pretend he hadn't heard: he was staring right at them. But he wasn't about to leave the side of a man who might or might not be bleeding to death in the dirt to attend one who, although obviously wounded and in some degree of pain, was soundly on his feet.

"I'm busy," he said firmly. "If I don't keep pressure on this wound, he might exsanguinate.

The Jem'Hadar who had been summoned for the consult took a menacing step over the lighted lip and into the ring. He raised his plasma rifle to train it on Julian. "You will do as you are told, prisoner, or you will die," he said savagely.

"You can shoot me," said Julian matter-of-factly. "And then my patient and I will both die. But he—" He jerked his chin towards the injured guard. "—will just keep bleeding. Of course, you could take him to the Vorta, if that's what you want. I'm sure he'd be delighted to help."

He was sure of no such thing, and the fact that Ikat'ika hadn't sent the younger soldier off to see Deyos immediately suggested that there was some compelling reason not to involve the Vorta in treating this injury. It might be no more sinister than a desire to avoid Deyos's idle contempt — which was certainly galling enough. But Julian wondered.

The Jem'Hadar now towering over him with a lethal weapon glanced back at the First, who shook his head once, tersely. Then Ikat'ika glared at Julian.

"You will attend my subordinate," he said. His voice was not so much stern as grimly certain. He desired this, and thus it would be so. He was the First, and Julian was his captive, and that was all there was to it.

And if he hadn't had a more critical patient under his hands right at that moment, that really would have been all there was to it. Julian would never have dreamed of leveraging his skills for personal advantage, or withholding care to win favours for himself or his friends. But for a dying patient, he would do what he had to do, with every means at his disposal.

"If you bring me what I need to treat this man," he said, straining his larynx to keep his voice hard and compelling; "then I'll do what I can for your operative."

The Jem'Hadar with the rifle made a noise of disgusted outrage and took another step closer. But Ikat'ika looked thoughtful.

"I cannot give you devices," he said. "I cannot give you anything that could be used as a weapon, or modified for some subversive purpose. Doctors are useless without their technology."

"Not Starfleet doctors," Julian said, and he had never declared anything with such certainty in his life. Hadn't he been proving all week that neither his knowledge nor his skills were slave to the computers and the resources and the sophisticated tools that he took for granted in his daily practice? He had done more with his meagre cache of bandages and his own two hands than he would have imagined possible. But that didn't mean there weren't things he needed.

"Bring me sterile dressings, forceps, and a tube of 2-octyl cyanoacrylate," instructed Julian, with the same authority he would have used with one of his nurses: firm and confident, but not abrasive or demanding.

Ikat'ika frowned. "No chemicals, no drugs," he decreed coldly.

Julian would have pinched the bridge of his nose if he hadn't had both hands occupied controlling the wound. "It's not a drug: it's an adhesive," he said. "To glue the wounds closed. Both of them, his and his." He nodded from the Cardassian to the Jem'Hadar. "If you won't let me have any tools or a suture kit, I need something."

"We do not have adhesives for such purposes," said the First. The young Jem'Hadar at his side was now slouching out of his militaristic posture, and he had his hand clamped to his bleeding neck. "We have a quantity of industrial adhesive for certain maintenance tasks, but it is highly toxic and dissolves the flesh."

"If your replicator can't translate Federation chemical names, bring me something so I can draw the molecule," Julian said.

Ikat'ika scowled at him. "Replicators are not issued to internment camp outposts," he said mechanically, as if reciting from a rote rulebook. "They pose a risk to security and order among the prisoners."

Julian had thought there was no more that he could learn about the conditions in this place that might surprise him. Apparently, he was mistaken. He could certainly see the security risk if prisoners were able to access a replicator. Even with a limited catalogue of preprogrammed patterns, the potential for someone to rewrite the algorithms to produce a weapon or a poison or any other imaginable contraband was too great. In Federation penal facilities, the replicators were carefully segregated from the inmate population and heavily guarded. But not to have one at all seemed far more dangerous. If every piece of equipment, every ounce of consumables, every quantity of every supply had to be brought in as freight, there were incalculable ways in which things could go wrong, and all manner of grim scenarios in which some essential item might arrive too late to do any good.

But he couldn't dwell on this, or on the merciless nature of a military apparatus willing to maroon thirty-one loyal soldiers (for that was what the Jem'Hadar and the Vorta were to the Dominion) on an isolated asteroid with over two hundred enemy combatants, without the means to produce any extemporaneous supplies or equipment. There was a man still bleeding, copiously, into a rag torn from his shirt. Julian had more pressing matters to attend to.

"Sterile dressings, then, and some kind of antiseptic," Julian said.

"And forceps," the First confirmed, looking pointedly at the Jem'Hadar in the ring.

Julian shook his head. "I've no use for forceps if I can't seal the wounds. Tell your man to be quick. If this patient dies before I can dress his wound, you'll get nothing from me." He took a deep breath, trying the mettle of his courage, and then added audaciously; "Or you could just have him bring me a medkit."

Ikat'ika shook his head, but his denial was not what Julian expected. "The Vorta has the medkit," he said coldly. Then to his subordinate; "Go. Quickly."

The one with the plasma rifle went with one last, reluctant glance at the man he hadn't been allowed to shoot. Julian didn't deign to notice. He was already turning back to the Cardassian. The pad he had made from his cuff was already drenched, the blood soaking through to soak his fingers. He pressed harder still, wondering if it was possible to put so much pressure on a skull that it disintegrated beneath your hands. He sincerely hoped it wasn't.

"Sit down," said Ikat'ika incongruously.

Julian didn't have much of an opportunity to wonder, because another puzzled person spoke first. "Sir?" the young Jem'Hadar asked.

"Sit. On the floor. You have seen the prisoners do it. Sit down." The First's voice still had the stern cadence of his people, but there was something else in it, too. Julian thought it might be patience. "You will waste less of your strength if you are not maintaining your posture."

Julian glanced away from his patient, unable to ignore the extraordinary spectacle of a Jem'Hadar soldier lowering himself to the floor and settling with one knee drawn up and the other leg crooked around his foot. He looked dazed and rather lost, and Julian wondered how old he was. Four years? Five? Or was he a newly dispatched trainee, not yet three years old and condemned to this hellhole as his first assignment?

That thought made Julian feel rather ill. The Jem'Hadar could not be measured by human standards, nor their development by human milestones. But thinking of that uncertain young soldier as a three-year-old was deeply dismaying.

He focused on the Cardassian instead. To call the grey skin ashen was meaningless, but there was a faint cyanotic tinge to the lips that Julian did not like. He adjusted his left hand to free up his right, and felt for the pulse on the uninjured temple. It was appreciable but thready, and the skin beneath his fingers was terribly cold. That might be the blood loss, or merely a response to the chill of the air.

Hard-soled boots clacked on the stone floor, and the armed Jem'Hadar returned. Julian had been expecting him to be juggling an awkward handful of foil packets, or perhaps even loose fistfuls of gauze. Instead, he had a forty-litre cargo container with stout hinges and a latch. Ikat'ika, too, seemed to find this incongruous. He frowned.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

The other soldier shrugged, something Julian wasn't sure he had ever seen a Jem'Hadar do. "It seemed most expedient."

Ikat'ika's jaw tightened and rippled, but he nodded at last. "Let him take what he needs," he said. "Assist him."

Julian could not quite believe what he was hearing. Neither, however, was he in a frame of mind to stammer or falter or to look a gift horse in the mouth. "Put it down right here, please, on my right side," he said. "Close, so I can see."

The Jem'Hadar obeyed, planting the container with a little more force than was strictly necessary and flipping open the latch with one horny thumb. He lifted the lid, and Julian's hopes of a well-appointed medkit or even a meticulously organized cache of dressings were dashed.

The case was almost empty. There were a few foil pouches, as he had imagined, marked with Dominionese characters he could not read. There were four rolls, not of tightly woven gauze but of what looked worryingly like the kind of lint bandages that turned up in some of Miles O'Brien's historical battle holoprograms. Two small steel bottles bore more inscrutable labels. There was a foil emergency blanket, two fat plastic envelopes that looked like endothermic dressings, and an empty shell that had once held a pair of old-fashioned surgical scissors. Julian wondered if they had been lost some time before, or if the guard had removed them because they looked too much like a weapon.

"Read me the labels on those bottles," he instructed. "And what is in the packets?"

"Isopropyl alcohol," the Jem'Hadar read. "Pyrrolidinone polymer. The packets are sterile gauze."

"Give me one of those," Julian said, trying to swallow his dismay at the primitive disinfectants. The Jem'Hadar held out one of the foil pouches. " _Open it_ ," Julian said, lips thinning with irritation that he really should have been wise enough to conceal. "My hands are full."

The Jem'Hadar glared blackly at him, but Ikat'ika was watching sternly, standing like a sentry over his bleeding subordinate. The reluctant assistant tore open the foil and, wonder of wonders, held its peeled sides back so that Julian could pluck up the gauze himself. He didn't imagine that Jem'Hadar battle training came with a module on sterile procedures, so either it was intuition or just plain luck.

He peeled off the square of shirt fabric, hesitating for two carefully measured seconds before replacing it with the gauze. For a moment he hoped that the bleeding had stopped, but then another bubble of blood welled up and broke. It wasn't an arterial gout this time, though, which was something to be thankful for. He applied the pad of gauze deftly and firmly, planting his palm again.

"Give me another one, soaked in the polymer solution," he instructed. He couldn't quite quell the bitter longing for real equipment, but at least he was going to be able to manage a proper dressing. When he had the extemporaneous disinfectant swab in his hand, he lifted the first pad and rapidly, skillfully cleaned the wound. "Take another and give it to him," he said as he worked, twitching his head briefly towards the wounded Jem'Hadar. "Hold that to your neck, and keep steady pressure on the wound."

A small audience was gathering, well out of the reach of any of the guards. The nearest group were Cardassians: four of them, huddled and anxious. Julian surmised they were his patient's barracks-mates. But in the corners of his eyes he could see others gathering, too, drawn by the improbable spectacle of a Jem'Hadar soldier crouching over the body of a fallen prisoner.

The wound was as clean as it was ever going to get, and it was starting to ooze again. Julian reapplied pressure and demanded another piece of gauze.

"I need a strip of the bandage, one point six metres long," Julian instructed. "Don't let it drag in the dust."

Again, the guard obeyed him. Julian wrapped the Cardassian's head once, put a third square over the wound just to be safe, and then knotted the length of bandage securely. He checked the man's pulse, and found it steadier than before. His breathing was regular. There was nothing to do but monitor him, and this was not a safe place to do that.

Julian looked up and beckoned to the knot of Cardassians. "Take him back to his barracks," he said. "If you tell me the number, I'll come and check on him as soon as I'm finished here."

They cast nervous glances at the squatting Jem'Hadar, and at First Ikat'ika just outside of the ring. Julian glared at his inexperienced aide. "Stand back and let them take him," he instructed.

Wonder of wonders, the man obeyed. The Cardassians approached warily, but they too knew the urgency. The Jem'Hadar's patience was notoriously fleeting. Leaving an injured comrade vulnerable in the open was not an option. They muttered amongst themselves while Julian sat back on his heels and wiped his hands on a scrap of lint bandage. It left flecks and puffs of fibre between his fingers, but he was absolutely certain that Ikat'ika would not let him go to disinfect: they wouldn't trust him to come back and fulfil his promise.

He got to his feet, lingering a moment longer than was probably wise. They hadn't told him their barracks number, and he was beginning to think they might not. But when they were all positioned at a limb, ready to lift, the oldest one muttered, "Fifteen."

Julian nodded. "I'll come as soon as they let me," he promised. Then he closed the cargo case, hefted it into his arms, and stepped steadily out of the arena. He knelt beside the injured Jem'Hadar, leaning in and reaching with his fingertips to examine the wound.

The guard hissed and shrank away, eyes blazing combatively. First Ikat'ika fixed the trainee — for Julian was increasingly convinced that he was very, very young indeed — with an icy, imperious eye. "You will let him treat you," the First decreed. "Allowances have already been made because of you: see that they are not wasted."

After that, the boy submitted to Julian's ministrations. None of his steady words or his bedside manner (which he took great effort to maintain unaltered, despite his patient's occupation and political affiliation) served to make the Jem'Hadar relax. But in the end, the bite was cleaned and carefully bandaged, in a configuration that did not impede the movement of the other two flaps. If the were indeed like gills, in that they contributed something to respiration or gas exchange, Julian did not want to restrict them more than necessary.

"Your friend is right," he said as he knotted off the dressing. "The bites are superficial. You've lost a chunk of skin and a small sliver of cartilage; that's all. It's going to hurt for a few days, and I should change the bandage the day after tomorrow. But you're going to make a full recovery."

"Will there be a scar?" the Jem'Hadar asked anxiously.

Ordinarily, that question in that tone of voice meant the patient was dismayed by the prospect. But Julian had heard the First's earlier words of encouragement. It was always important to tailor your answers to the cultural norms of the person you were treating, so he raked up a small, tired smile.

"Oh, you're definitely going to have a scar," he promised.

The young Jem'Hadar hissed, and looked quickly up at his first. Ikat'ika inclined his head. "Go, now," he said. "You are excused from other duties until it is time for the White."

The guard sprang nimbly to his feet and trotted off at a brisk, military clip. The other Jem'Hadar hung back. He pointed at the case. "Shall I return this to the cargo hold?" he asked.

"No," said Ikat'ika. "You are dismissed. Leave us."

The hard-eyed sentinel withdrew, but the shift of his eyes told Julian he did not go willingly. The perfect obedience bred into him and indoctrinated by teaching and the iron hammer of addiction held sway, and he did not argue or hesitate. But he resented his going, and he resented the human for watching him go.

Julian got to his feet, dusting off his knees as he did so. The right one was still wrapped in the bandage it really didn't need anymore, but it felt good to brush the grey residue from the black cloth of his uniform trouser on the left. "Are you done with me?" he asked. Then, knowing better but unable to resist, he said; "If there is any way I could have two or three packets of that gauze, I should change the Cardassian's dressing in two days as well."

He didn't expect an affirmative response, or that a comparison drawn between a prisoner and one of his own men would sway Ikat'ika. But the First tossed his head disdainfully at the cargo box. "Keep it all," he said.

Julian gawped at him. There was no other word for it. He blinked thrice, rapidly, but he couldn't form a coherent thought, much less speak an actual sentence.

Ikat'ika glared at him. " _Keep_  it," he repeated dangerously; "and the next time I command you to attend to one of my men, there will be no negotiations. Understood?"

Julian nodded quickly, dizzy with this stroke of fortune. There were still eight wrappers of gauze in that canister, and the disinfectants, and the cold packs. The thermal blanket alone—

Ikat'ika swooped down and flung the case open again. He fished inside, drawing out the crisp, metallic comforter. He held it up. "Except for this," he said. "Prisoners are not permitted nonstandard nocturnal coverings."

Embarrassed by his eagerness, and the feeling of having it smacked down almost as soon as it awoke, Julian bowed his heads in a nod of acquiescence. The blanket would have been valuable. The disinfectants were  _more_  valuable. That was all there was to it. He didn't dare to make eye contact with the First, lest something else should be clawed back.

"Do you understand the terms, human?" Ikat'ika demanded. "If my men are in need of attention…"

"I'll treat them," Julian promised. "If someone else is in more critical condition, they may have to wait. But I'll treat them, and I won't say a word to the Vorta."

Ikat'ika's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "I did not ask for such a consideration."

"You didn't have to," said Julian. "It's part of my oath. I don't discuss my patients with outsiders."

"Not even the ones who command them?" Ikat'ika growled skeptically.

He had Julian dead to rights there: certain breaches of confidentiality were necessary in Starfleet from time to time. If a crew member's safety or the safety of others were in jeopardy, a Chief Medical Officer might need to disclose details to a superior officer in a position of command. But that duty to declare was owed only to Captain Sisko or his deputed representative — most often, in practice, Major Kira Nerys. Julian owed nothing to Deyos.

"Not in this case," he said. "I will not share your men's medical needs with the Vorta."

Ikat'ika snorted, a cold noise of acknowledgement. Warily, Julian bent down to close the case. He picked it up, watching the First all the while.

"May I go?" he asked. Remembering Deyos's admonition during their brutal counting session, he added a laborious; "Please."

Ikat'ika stared at him, holding Julian's gaze with his own for twenty silent, eternal seconds. "One more thing," he said at last. "Your knee. It is healed? You no longer favour it when you walk."

"It's healing," Julian allowed. "It's much stronger now."

Something strangely like avarice ignited across Ikat'ika's face. He curled his lip into a rictus that was not quite a smile. "Then be ready," he advised with grim relish. "Tomorrow, it will be you in the ring."

 _(fade to black_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**auxiliary vertebrae (exo.):** the additional vertebrae on the sides of the Cardassian neck, colloquially called "Cardassian neck bones".  
**temporal artery (exo.):** a major blood vessel running under the skin of the temple in Cardassians. Seen on-screen whenever Doctor Bashir has to check Garak's pulse.  
**2-octyl cyanoacrylate:** a medical adhesive used since the early 21st Century to rapidly close a wound without sutures, colloquially called "skin glue"  
**isopropyl alcohol:** a primitive disinfectant, widely used in the 20th Century.  
**pyrrolidinone polymer:** a primitive iodine-based disinfectant, widely used in the 20th and 21st Centuries.


	23. Teaser: Adult Responsibility

**Part V, Teaser: Adult Responsibility**

In an alcove off the triage room, there was a small and well-appointed waiting area with comfortable armchairs where a patient's family could congregate for news of their loved one. It was a peaceful space, with a replicator and computer terminal and Bajoran tapestries on the walls. But as Jake Sisko stared unseeing towards the door that led to the operating room, he might as well have been sitting in a bare steel box.

Kasidy was in one of the chairs, curled up with her feet tucked beneath her and her head resting heavily on the upholstered back. She was fast asleep, exhausted by the upheaval and chaos of the past few days. Jake understood intellectually how fatigue could take over in moments of stress, but his heart simply could not conceive of giving over to slumber now. He was perched on the edge of his own chair, hunched forward over his lap with his long hands trapped between his knees to keep them from trembling.

"Computer?" he said, his voice breaking in a hoarse ascending octave as it hadn't done since he was fifteen. "Time."

"The time is 1821 hours and thirty-eight seconds," the computer recited in its cool, feminine voice.

Jake jittered in place, his stomach churning with blistering anxiety. Doctor Bashir had been operating for almost five hours. Jake didn't know how long the surgery was supposed to last — there hadn't been any opportunity to ask questions, and nobody had tried to explain any of it to him. That was maybe the most terrifying thing of all. Jake had seen Doctor Bashir operating in the chaos and overwhelming urgency of a battlefield hospital, and even amid the flood of critically wounded patients on Ajilon Prime, he had always taken a minute or two to explain what he was going to do — to the patient if they were conscious, or else to the friends or family members who had brought them in. If there hadn't even been time for a hasty summary of the procedure, his father's condition must have been far, far worse than Doctor Bashir had let on.

And he'd made it sound bad enough.  _His entire central nervous system is depolarizing_ , he had said, standing over the bed where Jake's father had been laid. He had suffered a seizure in the wardroom in front of Admiral Whatley and all of the dignitaries gathered to induct Bajor into the Federation. Apparently, Dad had staggered into the room in the throes of another vision, desperately declaring that Bajor could not join the Federation, or it would be destroyed. Then he had collapsed.

Jake didn't know what was happening now; what pandemonium had followed his father's pronouncement. He did know that the Bajoran leaders would take the word of the Emissary very seriously. Like Major Kira, they believed his visions were divine revelations from the Prophets, not the disordered hallucinations of a dying brain. But Jake didn't care. If Bajor joined the Federation, or pulled out at the last minute, it didn't matter. It was Admiral Whatley's problem, and he'd gone off to deal with it, and Jake was grateful he was gone.

Standing in that operating room, with his father — his strong, stately, indestructible father — lying still and dying on the biobed, had been one of the worst moments of Jake's life. In some ways, it was even worse than waking up on the bare deck of a cargo hold in the freighter that had picked up the survivors of the  _Saratoga_ , to see Dad's gaunt and tear-stained face above him as he explained that Mom was dead. At least then, Jake hadn't been so horribly and completely alone. His father had been there for him, as he'd always been there before and since, to hold him and reassure him and make him believe that someday, somehow, everything would be okay again.

He hadn't  _actually_ been alone, of course. Kasidy had been in there, too, gripping his arm as much to brace herself as to bolster him up. And Major Kira, who Jake knew his father respected and trusted; but she'd been opposed to the idea of the surgery from the start. Admiral Whatley had been there, pushing for the operation, but although he and Dad had been friends since Dad's Academy days, Jake didn't know the Admiral well and he was just a little afraid of him. And there had been Doctor Bashir, of course.

Jake had wanted Doctor Bashir to say something comforting. He was a good man, a compassionate man, and he'd always offered words of solace and support before. On Ajilon Prime, when Jake had been racked with guilt and self-loathing at his own failings and his cowardice, Doctor Bashir had said all of the right things. Jake hadn't been inclined to listen, overwhelmed and in turmoil as he'd been, but a part of him had still been glad the Doctor had tried. And the words had given him something to hold onto afterwards, as he searched his soul for some meaning to the terrible events that had transpired on that disputed world.

He had expected something similar today, and he hadn't gotten it. Instead, Doctor Bashir had abruptly shut down the debate between Major Kira and Admiral Whatley; she arguing that they respect Captain Sisko's wishes and he declaring that no visions, sacred or otherwise, were worth a man's life. And Doctor Bashir had laid out the situation starkly and without any room for debate or discussion: with his patient incapacitated, he couldn't go against his express wishes without the consent of his closest relative. And they had all looked at Jake.

He had known, he supposed, that it might come to this some day. Since the catastrophe at Wolf 359, Jake and his dad had really only had each other, and once Jake turned eighteen, he'd taken on the responsibility of being his father's legal next of kin. The life of a Starfleet officer was full of risks, and Jake had understood that he might one day be the one called upon to make a choice like this. But it seemed different, somehow, to what he had imagined. The visions, the strange behaviour that had accompanied them, Dad's adamant insistence that nothing be done to interrupt what he saw as revelations from Bajor's Prophets —- it was all too much for Jake to get his head around. And the fact that it hadn't been a wound sustained in battle or some deadly encounter with a new species or a Dominion plot that had done this to his father, but a malfunctioning holosuite computer… that made it all even harder to understand.

Jake wanted to understand. He needed to understand. But he couldn't. And as he sat here, his whole body taut with terror, Jake couldn't help but feel, with a deep and senseless hurt that he knew was childish, that Doctor Bashir could have taken a minute or two to  _help_  him understand. Doctors were supposed to do that. It was part of the job. Wasn't it?

The quiet  _hiss_  of a door made Jake stiffen in anticipatory dread. He heard the crackle of the sterile field as someone left the operating room, and then three steady footfalls on the deck plating. Jake's eyes went to the entryway, where someone bringing news out of surgery would surely appear. His heart was hammering, and he felt a terrible urge to leap to his feet and charge around the corner, demanding answers. But he was afraid his legs wouldn't hold him up, and he was paralyzed with dread, and he stayed where he was.

At last, the footsteps resumed, and Doctor Bashir came around the corner. Jake was briefly puzzled: the last time he'd seen the Chief Medical Officer, he had been dressed in the red surgical scrubs that he always wore for serious procedures, hastening down the corridor to disappear into the operating room. Now, he was once more in uniform, the new, grey-shouldered jacket that Jake still wasn't used to seeing on these officers he had seen for years in their department-specific jumpsuits. He would have preferred the old uniform now. He would have preferred anything at all that was familiar in this ghastly morass of the new and the terrible.

Doctor Bashir's eyes swept over the alcove, scarcely pausing on Kasidy's slumbering form before coming to rest on Jake. His expression was grave and unreadable.

"Doctor?" Jake croaked. His hands were shaking again, and he fumbled with them agitatedly. His chest was tight and it was difficult to breathe.

"The surgery was a success," said Doctor Bashir calmly. "The neural imaging is normal, and the polarization has stabilized. We'll be waking him up in about half an hour. I want to give his synapses a chance to rest before we subject them to the cortical stimulator."

The sudden relief as the crushing weight of nightmarish possibility dissolved and fell away swept the crumbling foundation from under Jake's thin veneer of composure. He crumpled over his knees, burying his face against them and clutching the back of his head with both hands. Hot gratitude and assuagement of his deepest horror overwhelmed him completely, and searing tears prickled in his eyes. A moment later he was already regaining his composure, once more conscious of the need to comport himself like an adult instead of a kid, but the sensation of instant reprieve lingered.

He half-expected to feel a hand on his shoulder, steady and comforting, but Doctor Bashir didn't approach. When Jake lifted his head at last, the tears finally sliding down each cheek, he saw the physician still standing in the entryway, watching him with quiet, thoughtful eyes.

"He's… he's… really?" Jake managed to choke out. He was quaking now, weak with thankfulness and the burden of daring to hope.

Doctor Bashir nodded gravely. "Good as new," he promised, but he wasn't smiling.

"A-and the visions?" Jake asked, remembering guiltily why his father had refused this surgery in the first place.

The sombre brown eyes remained unchanged, but the Doctor's mouth tightened almost apologetically. "He's not going to be having the visions anymore," he said. "They were almost certainly a result of the neural depolarization."

Jake felt a frisson of dread. Dad had been so adamant that nothing could interfere with the clarity he had gained in the inexplicable, staring epiphanies. Jake remembered abruptly the look of inscrutable serenity on his father's face as he tried to explain.  _The baby that I'm holding in my hands now is the Universe itself, and I need time to study its face…_

He hadn't been given the time. He'd had a seizure instead, and now the visions had been taken away. By consenting to the surgery,  _Jake_ had taken the visions away.

"Do you want to go in to see him now, Jake?" Doctor Bashir asked. There was something hollow about the question, as if he were reciting it off of a PADD instead of asking it in earnest. "You could be there when he wakes up if you'd like."

Five minutes ago, Jake would have wanted nothing more in the Galaxy. Now, suddenly, he wasn't sure.

"What if he hates me?" he asked, his voice low and tremulous. "He didn't want the surgery. What if he's angry at me for agreeing to it?" He glanced at Kasidy, still fast asleep in the next chair, and then lifted his plaintive gaze to Doctor Bashir, begging him for consolation, maybe even absolution.

"You saved his life, Jake," said Doctor Bashir soberly. "He'll understand that."

And that was all. No reassurance that he had made the right choice, no promise that all would be well, not even an affirmation that of course his father wouldn't hate him. Jake felt cold in the wake of dispersed disaster, and he was dazed and bewildered. On Ajilon Prime and later, after he'd read the contemplative piece Jake had written about his experience, Doctor Bashir had been quietly insightful.  _Wise_. He had been wise. Where was that wisdom now, when most Jake had need?

"I don't think I'm ready," Jake muttered, casting his eyes away. He sat back a little further in the soft chair, scrubbing his clammy palms against his thighs. "I… I'd rather wait until he asks for me. You know?"

He was expecting the Doctor to talk him out of it, to coax him up and into the room where his dad lay sedated. Maybe then he'd lay a comforting hand on his shoulder, or even put a brotherly arm around him. Jake didn't want to admit it — no boy of eighteen years ever did — but just at that moment, he needed a hug.

Instead, Doctor Bashir shrugged one shoulder. "Whatever you'd prefer," he said. "It's up to you."

 _Why is everything suddenly up to me?_  Jake wanted to howl. He hadn't been ready for this, for any of this. He wasn't ready to be the adult in the family. He wasn't ready to make decisions for the man who had raised him. He wasn't ready to shoulder the responsibility for something that might shape the fate of a whole planet for decades to come. He had thought he'd learned the hardest lesson of courage on Ajilon Prime. He was learning a much harder one now.

"I'd better get back in there," said Doctor Bashir. "I want to run a couple of scans before I start waking him up. He's going to be just fine, Jake. Don't worry."

The words sounded so hollow. Jake supposed that was because he was drowning in a flood of conflicting emotions. Joy, gratitude and relief warred with guilt, regret and fear, and Jake couldn't find a way to express any of it. One thing was certain: he didn't dare to face his father, and he couldn't bear not to.

Doctor Bashir had been watching him pensively. Now, he turned around and walked away, back up the short corridor towards the operating room.

 _Wait!_  The word never reached Jake's lips. Suddenly he was alone again, awash in his turbid sea of feelings while Kasidy slept peacefully beside him.

He heard the sterile field crackle, and the door slide shut. He sagged back in the chair, clutching the arms and sinking low so that his long legs stuck far out into the empty floorspace. Struggling to understand how he could feel so miserable when he had just received the best news he could possibly have hoped for, Jake screwed his eyes closed.

He didn't know how long he sat there, numb and anxious. But he heard his father's voice when Doctor Bashir activated the cortical stimulators to awaken him. It was a desperate, keening wail of anguish that chilled Jake's blood and almost stopped his heart.

" _NO! You took them away!_ "

Jake couldn't bear it. His resolve to wait for Doctor Bashir to come back for him disintegrated. He couldn't bear to face his father. He knew his father wouldn't want to see him. Jake sprang to his feet and launched out of the waiting alcove and up the corridor towards the exit. Behind him he could hear Kasidy stirring, waking, asking a bleary question. He ignored her and fled.

Nurse Jabara was at the desk by the dispensary, transcribing something from a PADD with the Starfleet Medical staff and serpent on the back. She looked up as he stumbled past, rising at once.

"Jake?" she asked kindly. "Is everything all right? Is there anything I can do to help?"

The tender concern in her voice almost broke him. Jake shook his head feverishly. "Tell my dad," he started, choking on the beloved word. "Tell him… I'll see him when he's home again…"

He staggered out onto the Promenade, the thundering in his ears blotting out Nurse Jabara's worried questions. Jake was dimly aware that he was drawing curious eyes; people were staring. He forced himself to slow down to a brisk walk, fighting for control over his face and his heart as he strode desperately towards the nearest turbolift. As he went, he tried desperately to remember the only thing that really mattered.

Dad was going to live.

 _(fade to theme_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary**

**Depolarization of central nervous system:**  a critical injury to the brain and nerves, caused by the holosuite malfunction in 5.10 "Rapture".

 


	24. Stratagem

**Part V, Act I: Stratagem**

When Julian finally left Barracks 15, he was confident that the Cardassian with the ruptured temporal artery would, all other things being equal, make a full recovery. He was awake, groggy and very tired but lucid. The bleeding had stopped. The dressing was neat, snug and aseptic. Julian's quick intervention and the bargain with Ikat'ika had saved the man's life.

The need to follow up with his patient had proved a welcome distraction from the First's grim declaration. As Julian made his way back to his own cell with the large, mostly-empty case in his arms, the implications of those words began to sink in, and his courage faltered. He had seen enough of what went on in the ring to know that fear was a perfectly rational response to the news that he was next. That didn't mean he wasn't ashamed of himself for feeling it, and for giving his captors that much power over him.

He had options, he told himself. His strength and stamina were greater than those of most humans —  _unnatural_ , he thought, with a sickening wrench that had nothing to do with the threat of the arena — but against one of the Dominion's elite killers he didn't think they'd prove quite so remarkable. His speed and agility, however, were superior to anything he'd witnessed in the guards so far. He might be able to elude serious harm, at least for a while.

Sub-Commander Darok's strategy held some appeal: put up a show of ineptitude, take a couple of hard knocks, and then counterfeit unconsciousness. He might even be able to  _induce_  unconsciousness, if he could cause his blood pressure to bottom out quickly enough. If he fainted dead away at the first hard knock, would they beat on him while he was out? Would they revive him and put him back in the ring again? Or would they simply, as Darok's experience implied, call an end to the proceedings and walk away?

But something about that plan didn't sit well with Julian. It was expedient, and perhaps the only way to avoid serious injury, but it smacked of cowardice nonetheless. It wasn't just his own pride at stake, either. He was the first human they'd ever had in the ring; how many times had he been told that since awakening on this lifeless asteroid? He was the first Starfleet officer, at least as far as Tain knew, and was anything Enabran Tain  _didn't_  know even worth knowing? Julian was the first representative of his planet, of his homeworld, of his whole society, that these Jem'Hadar would ever face in combat. He was an ambassador of all humanity. If he didn't even attempt to make a good showing, the humiliation would not be his alone.

Julian wasn't comfortable with the other extreme, either. If he fought as hard as he could, using all of his strength and his superior ( _unnatural, freakish, monstrous_ ) dexterity, all of the hand-to-hand combat training Starfleet provided its officers, the tricks of evasion and compensation he'd honed as a champion of racket sports, his capacity for highly specific observation and split-second strategizing, and the full force of his intellect, he might well prove almost as formidable an opponent as Martok surely had in the early days. But without sheer physical power and a reinforced skeletal system to rely on, he  _would_  have to use all his other gifts to do it, and that included his medical knowledge.

There were things Julian knew about Jem'Hadar physiology that would be helpful in an all-out fight to the last. The clearly agonizing result of having the neck-flaps bitten was only one such example. But the problem was that he knew these things not as a soldier, but as a doctor. He could fight if he had to: to defend himself, to protect others, even to advance Starfleet's position or safeguard its assets. But turning his medical expertise to violent ends trod very near an ethical line that Julian was loath to skirt, much less cross.  _Primum non nocere_ , he thought as he trudged the last few metres to the door of Barracks 6.  _First, do no harm_.

He nudged the panel with his elbow and then, when that brought no response, with the back of a hand still clutching the cargo container. It was heavier than a Starfleet-issue tote of the same size: either the walls were thicker, or the material was more dense. The door squawked open and Julian lurched across the threshold inelegantly, still lost in troubled thought. He set down the canister heavily on the nearest bench, and that was when he realized, uneasily, that all five of his cellmates were waiting for him.

He had expected the other four to be occupied with the minutiae that were all they had to fend off madness during the eternal hours between mealtime and curfew. But Tain should have been in the wall right now, working. Instead, he was sitting on his cot in the languid way he had that made the decidedly less-than-comfortable piece of furniture look positively luxurious.

Unsettled, his brain already racking up a list of every grim explanation for this turn of events, Julian looked from face to face. Tain's was improbably dreamy, as usual. Martok looked haggard and strained, no doubt still fighting the pain of yesterday's injuries. Parvok, naturally, looked pale and skittish. Kalenna was silent and solemn. The Breen was lying on their back, the snout of their helmet pointed at the ceiling. None of this was unexpected, and yet there was something in the air, a crackle of unease that made the nape of Julian's neck bristle with instinctual dread that only deepened as seven eyes pivoted suddenly on him.

Was it possible they knew already? First Ikat'ika had spoken quietly, and only Julian had been near enough to hear. But word must travel quickly in a place like this, and if the combat schedule was common knowledge among the Jem'Hadar, it wasn't out of the question that it could have reached Tain's ears by now.

But neither was he going to announce it if there was any chance the others might not know. They would have to be told eventually, but none of them were going to like it. Julian had been condemned to almost a full Dominion Standard Day of fretting over his fate; he didn't need to foist that on the others.

"What's wrong?" he said carefully, looking from Tain to Martok to Kalenna. It was the order of increased probability of getting a straight answer, he realized inanely.

But it was the Cardassian, not the Romulan, who spoke. "We need to talk, Doctor," he said.

Julian wondered if Tain knew how ominous those words could be in human culture. He decided he almost certainly did. He guarded his expression as he moved around to the other side of the table and sat, facing Martok. it left Kalenna and Parvok behind him, each offset to one side, but he wasn't feeling very firm on his feet and it didn't seem wise to grapple with the cargo canister right now.

"Just you and I?" he asked Tain, wary of an affirmative answer. He knew his behaviour outside had been the antithesis of low-profile, and although it had all been in the service of medical necessity, he expected to have a hard time persuading the Cardassian of that.

Tain snorted. It wasn't quite his usual chuckle. He looked somehow subdued, and thoughtful. "Not this time," he said. "The five of us. Our little band of conspirators, Doctor, if that notion appeals to your romantic side."

It would have done, three weeks ago. It would have seemed epic and adventurous, like something out of an old war novel or one of the 20th Century spy thriller holoprograms that were Felix's specialty. Here, with the stakes so desperate and the threat of death so real, the words left Julian feeling more exhausted than ever. He was shivering again, too, and he couldn't seem to subdue the tremors. His eyes drifted to his cot, with the thin blanket folded precisely across the foot. It seemed like too much effort to rise, navigate around General Martok, and fetch it. He needed to conserve his energy for tomorrow. He stayed where he was and endured the chill.

"What is it?" he asked heavily. He was tired of Tain's games and didn't intend to engage him. But then the busy back room of his brain totted up another ghastly explanation for the aura of concealed agitation in the room. Julian's head snapped up, suddenly alert. "Has something gone wrong with the transmitter?"

Three voices answered at once.

"Not at all!"

"Not exactly."

"Not  _yet_."

Julian turned his focus on Martok. "What do you mean,  _not yet_?" he asked intently.

The Klingon warrior glared at him, trying to conceal a flicker of dismay. "We have come to an impasse in the proceedings," he said. "Tain can go no farther."

"Why not?" Julian demanded, shifting his shoulders as he looked at Tain so that he didn't put too much strain on his stiff neck.

"I need to reconnect to the prison's main power grid before I can do anything more," said Tain.

"And that presents a problem?" asked Julian warily.

"No," said Tain. At the same moment, Kalenna said; "Yes."

The cot squeaked as she stood up, coming to stand just off of Julian's left shoulder. She looked sternly at Tain. "Explain to him what is needed," she insisted.

"It's not an insurmountable problem, and it's foolish to pretend that it is," Tain clucked condescendingly. To Julian, he said; "The Major and the General seem to think we've got an impossible conundrum on our hands, but it's really very simple."

"Is it a matter of equipment?" Julian asked, trying to see the difficulties. "What do you need in order to wire the old life support unit into the power grid? I assume it was never part of it in the first place, if the barracks used to be stand-alone units."

"You're correct," said Tain, sounding pleased. "You know more about engineering than the average doctor, don't you? Or is that simply another Starfleet extravagance, training all personnel in all disciplines? Do your engineers know how to set a broken leg, too?"

Julian ignored the jibe. "I know enough to get by," he said. "If it's a question of components, there must be some way to salvage what you need. If it's possible to get into the walls of the mess area by climbing up the ore conveyor, maybe we—"

Tain waved him off dismissively. "I have all the necessary components," he said. "What I need is an opportunity to make the connections without getting caught."

Julian's mind whirred over this information. Did the power need to be connected at some external junction? Where the barracks met the pod, perhaps, or somewhere else? Somewhere that might be guarded, or at least less sheltered from the watchful eyes of the Jem'Hadar? He didn't ask his questions, though. He had a feeling Tain was about to pontificate on the subject, and he wasn't interested in the contempt a wrong guess might garner.

"As far as I've been able to determine," Tain went on; "there are two places on this asteroid where power usage is monitored. The first is at the generator station beyond the dome, where even the Jem'Hadar do not go without grave cause. The second is on the command pylons in the Vorta's office. I can perform the necessary modifications within the wall—" And there was his answer. "—but if Deyos is at his desk when I do so, he is almost certain to notice the fluctuation."

"How often do they run system diagnostics?" asked Julian. "A chronic increase in power usage won't go unnoticed, either."

"Once the transmitter is integrated into the supply, the drain should be minimal," said Tain. "But I'll be drawing considerably more energy while I'm in the process of stabilizing the connections, and more importantly, it will fluctuate. Rapid changes, even small ones, are eye-catching. As for system diagnostics, there is no way to know. The Vorta may indeed look back at the records at some point, and notice something amiss. It is even possible that the computer is set to store an alert of any unusual activity, though I doubt the Dominion would bother with that level of vigilance here, where they believe us completely under their control. But that is an unavoidable risk, and the chances of Deyos noticing something while he is in front of the live feed is far greater. Practically unavoidable, I would say."

"I agree with that," said Kalenna grimly. "It would be suicidal to attempt it while the Vorta has access to his computer terminal."

Julian didn't speak. He thought it might be possible to bring the Vorta's computer terminal offline temporarily, if they had access to some other interface with database functionality. But the only display panels Julian had seen were the ones that opened the barracks doors, and the one that controlled the hand sterilizer in the waste reclamation room. Even if any of them had been able to read more than a handful of Dominionese characters (Julian was beginning to get a grasp on their numerical system, just from the idle glimpses of the labels over the lintel of each barracks), it was doubtful that those kind of panels offered any scope for accessing the broader computer system.

It wasn't his area of expertise, anyway. Hacking into a hostile power's unfamiliar interface to enable a front-end scripting language where it had never been designed to be accessible was more Jadzia's territory. Miles might have had some other strategy for accomplishing the same end, probably involving a quantum spanner and a few hours wedged into a space tight enough to make Tain's passageway look positively palatial. But neither of them were here right now, and if Tain was capable of such sabotage — which was certainly not unlikely, if he could make sense of the jumble of wires and components inside the wall — his talents were required elsewhere.

There was another problem with that kind of plan, anyway: if the Vorta's computer were suddenly to fail, there would be some kind of investigation. It was too conspicuous an act.

Apparently, Parvok had made a suggestion along those lines while Julian was lost in thought, because Tain was eyeing him disdainfully as he said exactly the same thing.

"—round up the entire prison population and shoot us one by one, most likely, until the saboteur confessed. Fool of a Romulan," Tain spat. "No. We need some other means of preventing the Vorta from looking at his terminal while I work. The only thing for it is to stage a distraction."

Martok made his discontented rumbling sound, shaking his head so that his mass of dark hair billowed around his shoulders. "What manner of distraction could possibly draw the Vorta from his office for… how long did you say this would take, Tain?"

"An hour, if I'm lucky," Tain said. "There are some things I won't be able to plan out until I'm actually in there and the power is flowing. The auxiliary battery's been dead for six weeks: I can't even get a flicker out of it anymore. The longer I can get, the better off we'll be."

"There's only one time of day we can rely on the Vorta being out of his office for that amount of time," said Kalenna.

"During the count," Martok said dourly. He twisted at the waist so he could look back towards Tain. "And you cannot be absent then, or there will be trouble for everyone in the camp."

"Sometimes he goes days without emerging for any other reason," Parvok said uneasily. Julian glanced back to see him skittering towards the door and peering warily out into the corridor beyond.

"What about a disruption during the meal?" said Kalenna. "He takes complaints about the food as a personal affront. He'd make an appearance for that."

Parvok's voice wavered fearfully. "But then one of us would have to…"

"Complain about the food," Kalenna said matter-of-factly. "I am aware of that, Sub-Lieutenant, and you need not be afraid. I am not asking it of you."

"Then are you volunteering?" Tain asked curiously. "That's exceptionally selfless of you, Major."

She turned dispassionate eyes upon him. "Selfless for a Romulan, you mean?" she said dryly.

Tain chuckled. "My, my, Major, isn't that in rather poor taste?"

Martok was shaking his head. "Ration call is no good," he said. "Two of us would have to forego their share in order to stay back in the barracks, or else try to sneak away from the mess area during the commotion. And  _that_  is almost as prohibited as missing the count."

"If two of us didn't draw a water ration, and with the Major in isolation for protesting the meal," Parvok said uneasily; "we would only have six litres for the five of us remaining."

Julian sat quietly, listening to all of this even though he knew it was fruitless talk. There was only one solution, and the timing was suspiciously, almost poisonously, perfect. His only question at this moment was whether Enabran Tain had seen it already — whether his reach, so boundless when he had ruled the Cardassian empire from the shadows, extended now to the far end of the atrium where the Dominion administrators of the prison made these decisions behind closed doors.

"I can't see any other way," said Tain. There was no theatrical regret in his voice, only a grim determination that Julian found far more convincing than any dramatic protestation. "General Martok is right: trying to sneak off after the meal has begun is too great a risk. Someone will simply have to stay back with me. You've all worked out a very sophisticated system of sharing your resources when someone's caught short: you'll just have to extend the same courtesy to me that you did to the good Doctor, here."

"So Kalenna will be in isolation," Julian said slowly, spelling out the costs of this plan. "And we'll each have to manage on a little better than half a water ration, and you, Tain, and whoever stays to keep watch while you're working, will have to go without food for almost three days. That's not a small inconvenience, you know. I very nearly didn't make it through the count this morning."

"I take it you're not volunteering for the job, then?" Tain said sweetly.

"I will do it," said Martok. "Enforced hunger is not the empowering and clarifying experience of a ritual fast, but the pangs themselves are no worse."

"That isn't the only problem with this plan," said Julian. He turned to Kalenna. "Do you really think you can keep Deyos occupied for over an hour, just by complaining about the food."

"No," Kalenna admitted. She glanced at Tain as if wishing him vanished from the room. "I will try, but I do not think it is in my nature to goad him very long."

At least she was honest about her limitations, and Julian couldn't fault her for this one. She would have been raised from babyhood to defer to authority, in appearance at least, even if she rebelled in her heart. It wasn't an easy thing to learn how to stick your neck out if you'd never done it before. He remembered his first few terrifying attempts, and he'd only been a prepubescent boy rebelling against a domineering father, not a fully indoctrinated officer of the Tal Shiar facing the lethal force of the Dominion.

"It's a senseless risk," he said. "Too great a cost for too slight a gain. The probability of success is dismal, and if Deyos gets back to his computer too early, before Tain is finished, suspicion for any anomaly will fall on you first."

Kalenna met his eyes calmly. "If you are intimating that you wish to take my place, Doctor, I must refuse. You may be more adept at distracting the Vorta, but you are too lately recovered from your abduction and yesterday's ordeal to endure the rigours of isolation. If you complain about the rations…"

Julian shook his head, and she fell silent. "No one is going to complain about the rations."

"You're quite the naysayer today, Doctor," Tain groused. "If you have some better suggestion, I recommend you make it and stop trying all our patience."

It was the unadulterated irascibility in his tone that convinced Julian that he  _didn't_  know what First Ikat'ika intended for tomorrow. He took a petty little moment to relish the feeling of having some slip of information that Tain did not possess, before promptly sacrificing his advantage for the greater cause of escape.

"As a matter of fact, I do have a better suggestion," he said. "The First took me aside when I was done treating today's combatants, and he informed me that it's my turn tomorrow."

The responses were instant, simultaneous, and far more vehement than Julian had expected. Parvok made a strangled noise of alarm. Kalenna stiffened and yelped, "They can't!" Martok sat up straighter, squaring his shoulders despite the reflexive flinch as his wounded arm tensed. "In the ring?" he growled.

Only Tain and the Breen seemed unaffected. The elderly Cardassian tilted his head thoughtfully. "Did he, now?" he mused.

Julian nodded stiltedly, fighting his dread. "It's entirely possible the Vorta will come out to witness the fight of his own accord," he said. "He's certainly intimated that he's been looking forward to it. If he doesn't, I could probably goad him into it."

Martok shook his head. "Romulans are driven to exhaustion and clumsiness in minutes, despite their fabled stamina," he said. "Cardassians are routinely beaten half to death. Even I…" He did not finish that sentence, but instead gestured broadly up and down his battle-weary body, lingering last of all on his blind, scarred socket. "You have proved yourself a man of uncommon courage, Doctor, but a human against a Jem'Hadar, unarmed in hand-to-hand combat? It will be carnage."

It was all the same litany of terror that had been clawing at Julian's heart despite his efforts to suppress it. He didn't trust himself to speak. He fixed his eyes on Martok's lone one, and exerted all his will to keep from shuddering.

"There's no way out of it," Tain said, maddeningly frank and almost cheerful again. "We might as well turn it to our advantage."

"There is one way," growled Martok. He heaved himself to his feet. The effort it cost him was well-concealed, but he couldn't fool his physician. He pulled himself up to his full height, and but for the arm tucked snugly inside of his vest, he might have been a stately statue in the Hall of Warriors, proud and puissant and fearless. He gazed unseeing into the distance, his eye suddenly clear as he stared at some unseen beacon of the mind. "I will speak to Ikat'ika," he declared solemnly; "and I will take your place."

The vehement declaration that he would do no such damned fool thing died in Julian's chest long before there was any risk of it rising to his lips. His reflexive professional indignation that a man in Martok's condition would even consider entering the ring so soon was quickly overpowered by a different, deeper instinct. In that moment, looking up at the battered warrior standing so proudly, briefly transported from his purgatory of futile suffering, Julian saw a truth far greater than half-blind self-sacrifice in defence of a weaker comrade. He saw the depths of the man's valour, and the legacy of generations of mighty Klingons behind him: stalwart soldiers and fearless foremothers stretching back into antiquity.

And in that moment, Julian understood that the offer was made not out of pity for him, but out of the deepest respect. Martok had found him worthy to be upheld in this way: with the flagging strength of his body, with the indomitable fire of his spirit, and, if need be, with his very life. Dismissing such an offer, or scolding the maker, would be more than cruel. It would be a profound dishonour for both of them: a disgrace that would diminish Julian, and wound Martok far more deeply than the Jem'Hadar ever could.

"That's a valiant proposition," Julian said. "I am honoured by your courage and determination. But it cannot be."

He was trying to match the uniquely Klingon cadence that Commander Worf employed, and that Jadzia could slip into almost instinctually. It sounded clumsy and stilted in his voice, which was much more suited to sober explanations and snarky quips. But from the look in Martok's eye as it pivoted back to his face, Julian knew that the feeling behind his words had come across regardless.

"You've been a frequent contender in the arena," he said, easing into a more familiar cadence. He was educating, breaking down the problems in this plan as he might lay out a complex surgery in terms a patient and their family could understand and digest in service of an informed decision. "The Jem'Hadar are eager to fight you, because you are the greatest challenge to their skills and strength. But you're not an enticement for the Vorta. Deyos is a man who bores easily: he would not be interested in watching you fight yet again."

Martok bared his teeth in a disgusted hiss, but he tossed his head in agreement as he sat heavily down. He hitched himself to the side, adjusting his position on the bench to ease his hip. His left shoulder rolled almost subconsciously against the ache in his elbow.

"And it's been established that we need the diversion to last as long as possible," Julian went on. He cast a querying half-glance at Tain, who nodded hypnotically. He was watching all of this with avid interest, almost alight with enchantment at the spectacle. "I reset your arm yesterday, General. If you go out there tomorrow, the very first Jem'Hadar will yank on it, and pull it out of joint again, and the match will be over in seconds."

"You do not know they would try that," said Martok. "The Jem'Hadar have no honour, but it is in their best interest to prolong the fight, if they wish to learn how best to defeat us."

"They'll try it," said Julian. "They're not stupid: by now, every single one of them must know you're vulnerable in the left arm. In their place, it's exactly what I would do."

He hoped this wasn't true. He hoped he'd be able to refrain from using precisely this kind of specialized knowledge of medical vulnerabilities against his opponent tomorrow. But he feared that in a moment of desperation, he might cave to the temptation, and not for a moment did he doubt the Jem'Hadar would employ such tactics.

Martok glowered. "You will not keep them occupied an hour," he muttered, trying to mask his shame at this uncomfortable truth. "I do not wish to offend you, Doctor, but you are…" He sighed in inarticulate discouragement, wafting his hand up and down the length of Julian's lean frame.

"I'm not much to look at," Julian agreed. He had always been grateful that someone — he didn't know who, but there must have been  _someone_  — had talked his parents out of the modifications to breadth of bone and muscle mass that would have brought his appearance more comfortably in line with old stereotypes of the genetically enhanced supermen who had tried to conquer Earth centuries ago. At the moments in his life when it had seemed impossible to slip by unnoticed, he had at least been able to walk into a room secure in the knowledge that the first impression his rangy body projected was not  _eugenic monster_.

"But I'm fast," he said, not even pausing as he drove back those thoughts. He was grateful for his unobtrusive physique, that was the point: he wasn't going to regret it now just because he had to go toe-to-toe with a bloodthirsty Jem'Hadar tomorrow. "And I may be a human and a doctor, but Starfleet doesn't let any of its officers out into the Galaxy without the skills to defend themselves."

"They'll kill you," Kalenna said quietly. She was looking at the side of Julian's skull, and he knew what she was seeing. His temporal bone, less than four millimetres thick. His fragile jaw, unprotected by the calcified striae the Cardassians enjoyed. His smooth brow, without a Klingon's indestructible crests and bumps or even the ridges her own head bore. His neck with its slender, delicate vertebrae — just one strand of them, so easily snapped or crushed. Even his occipital bone, the thickest part of his skull, was less than a centimetre thick. Nimble or not, genetically enhanced or not, he was still human enough to be frail as a child beside the more aggressive physiology of every other Alpha Quadrant species in this prison.

But he didn't really want to dwell on things that could not be helped, and neither his anatomy nor the necessity of facing the arena tomorrow could be wished away. Julian looked steadily up at Kalenna, putting on his most reassuring patient-care face.

"They have no reason to kill me," he said. "They just want to test my abilities in the ring, like they've done with everyone else."

He realized suddenly that he had never asked her if she'd had a turn in the Jem'Hadar's arena. It seemed unlikely that some idea of gallantry would have spared her. As her right hand drifted up to the hollow of her shoulder, Julian began to suspect something of her experience.

"But how can you hope to last an hour?" she whispered. He had never seen her look so deeply affected, so vulnerable. It did his own anxiety no favours.

"Oh,  _I_  think that Doctor Bashir is eminently qualified to last as long as he wants to in the ring," drawled Tain. He hadn't spoken in so long that Julian had half-forgotten that he was sitting there. He planted a hand on each knee and hoisted his broad frame off of the cot, strolling over to clap a cupped palm on Julian's shoulder. "These Starfleet types, Major: they're full of surprises."

Julian looked up at him, surprised to find that it was Tain, of all people, who trusted him to do this. The Cardassian grinned down at him, mirth dancing in his eyes.

"And as for goading the Vorta into coming out to watch," said Tain; "I'm absolutely convinced you're the man for that job! Let's put your Federation obduracy to work for us for once, shall we?"

Julian forced a thin approximation of a style. "Happy to oblige, Tain," he said dryly.

The aged spymaster chuckled, and then tweaked Julian's earlobe between finger and thumb. "You're a cheeky one," he declared. "But I can't fault your commitment to your little rebellion. Anything in the name of the cause, am I right, Doctor?"

"Anything in the name of freedom," Julian corrected, nodding his head towards the loose wall panels and the desperate hope of rescue that lay behind them. "I have no intention of rotting on this rock."

"Then we're all agreed?" Tain asked, looking broadly around the room as if inviting further input. All of them knew he wanted nothing of the sort: only assent was welcome, not debate. "Major? General? Sub-Lieutenant?"

"I would deny no man his day of reckoning," said Martok. He fixed his eye on Julian again. "If you are determined to fight, I will be at your side."

"If there's no other way," Kalenna said quietly. She had control over her eyes again, and her face was set in its usual stoic lines.

"It's for the best," agreed Parvok, but Julian noticed he had not offered any inkling of his opinion until his superior had spoken. "It puts the fewest of our number at risk."

They would all be at risk if something went wrong, and the drain on the power supply came to Deyos's notice after all, but pointing that out would be spiteful and far too pessimistic. Julian nodded instead.

"Then we're agreed," he said steadily. He had to swallow forcefully. His mouth was very dry. "Tomorrow, we'll connect the transmitter to the grid."

Not even Enabran Tain was unkind enough to make him reiterate the rest of it.

 _(fade_ )


	25. In the Arena

**Part V, Act II: In the Arena**

Julian sat on the edge of the bench nearest the door, trying to restrain the urge to fidget even though his whole body was thrumming with tension. The others were watching him as they all waited for the Jem'Hadar to come for him. Only Tain was absent, already secreted away inside the wall so that not even a second should be wasted once the Vorta left his office. Parvok was standing in the corner by the door, hands clasped behind his back as he rocked nervously on the balls of his feet. Kalenna was perched on the side rail of her cot, hands folded over her knees. If not for the rigidity of her spine and the whiteness of her knuckles, she might have passed for calm. And Martok stood at Julian's left shoulder, towering over him like a glowering sentinel.

It had been an intolerably long thirty-four hours — closer to thirty-three, Julian supposed, since yesterday's match and ringside triage had ended with Ikat'ika's pronouncement. Once the plan had been laid out, there hadn't been much more to discuss, and the inhabitants of Barracks 6 had settled in for a long and featureless afternoon. It had been an ordeal of forbearance, Julian first sitting huddled on his uncomfortable cot with his blanket bundled around his shivering body, waiting for the perspiration to evaporate from his undergarments and watching as Enabran Tain began to slowly succumb to the painful torpor that all the rest of his compatriots were suffering in the cold. At first he seemed to grow solemn, then drowsy. Finally, he was slumped against the wall with his knees spraddled over the lip of the bunk, eyes closed to slits as he sawed in slow, laborious breaths.

Eventually, Julian could not bear to watch it any longer. He had unfolded his curled limbs and crossed the room, and he had suggested none too subtly that perhaps there was some preparatory work to be done inside the wall, just to be sure everything was neat and orderly for the next day's urgent task. Tain had glared at him suspiciously, but he'd dragged himself up off the cot and crawled with almost glacial slowness into his workspace. It was hardly comfortable in there, but it was warm.

After that, Julian had been reluctant to settle back into lethargy and dread. So he'd taken himself through every physical therapy routine and manoeuvre he could think of, testing the limits and the endurance of his right knee. He had then carried out as much of his racquetball warm-up regiment as he could, given the limitations of the space and the fact that by then, his healing joint was beginning to ache wearily. Finally he had to give up on pursing some illusion of physical readiness, and he lay down instead, bundled once more in his blanket, and tried to take his mind away.

He had learned a few meditation strategies from Major Kira, whose daily contemplative routine was a part of her Bajoran spirituality. But Julian had never had much luck in emptying his mind of thought: rapid, complex, almost manic distraction was more his approach to managing emotional upheaval and psychological distress. He was starting to realize how destructive that habit might prove in this place, and so he had tried, genuinely tried, to think of nothing at all.

He remembered the Altonian brain teaser that Jadzia had introduced him to during their first weeks serving together on Deep Space Nine: an ephemeral sphere of swirling colour that was attuned to the player's theta waves. With complete clarity of thought and perfect focus, it was supposed to be possible to transform the orb into a single colour. Jadzia was able to achieve a shimmering soap-bubble sunset of iridescent blues and purples and magentas. But when she had turned control of the sphere over to Julian, it had muddied into a maelstrom of violent, bright hues before bursting in under a second. She had smiled and squeezed his shoulders, amused and playfully teasing:  _I think your mind is still a little busy, Julian_. And she'd been right, of course. But even afterwards, returning time and again to the holosuite to tackle the unusual puzzle, Julian had been unable to even mimic Jadzia's peaceful eddies. Eventually he learned how to maintain the structural integrity of the sphere, but for all his unnatural abilities, he had never conquered the puzzle: he could focus with laser precision, but he could never clear the rest of his mind.

It was no easier in a cold, barren room than in the quiet comfort of one of Quark's holosuites. Julian had lain there for hours in a turmoil of dread, wild imaginings, meticulously catalogued worst-case scenarios and woefully inadequate attempts at academic distraction. It had been a relief when at last Tain had knocked to be let out of the wall, once more warmed back to his usual falsely cheerful self. By then, it was finally close enough to curfew that Julian could justify trudging down to the waste reclamation room at the end of the pod to carry out what was fast becoming his meagre and woefully inadequate evening routine.

Even with all he had to fret over, Julian couldn't help but fixate on all the things he wanted to be doing, but could not. Peeling off his uniform, no longer crisp and fresh, and the undergarments beneath, which were definitely starting to smell. Stepping into the sultry warmth of the Cardassian steam bath in his quarters, an extravagant luxury on a space station, especially one no longer in orbit around a resource-rich planet, but something the previous administration had apparently considered essential in command officer accomodations. He had a sonic shower, too, installed after Starfleet had taken control of the station for officers accustomed to the efficiency and rapidity of the units. It lacked the delicious sensual decadence of the Cardassian apparatus, but Julian would have gladly availed himself of it now. A low-pitched sonic shower was a pleasant way to unwind at the end of a hard day, and in his present state of oily grunginess, it would have been such a piteous relief to be clean again, whatever the means.

He longed to wash his face with soap and hot water, and the yearning for a shave was almost too much to endure. Julian's neck and jaw itched, and the scruff of dark stubble crackled against his cheeks whenever they brushed against anything: his shoulder, his lumpy little pillow, his palms. As for his teeth, now perpetually sticky and furred with residue, he could not even bear to imagine what it might be like to run his tongue over smooth, clean enamel again. It made him feel sick and savage.

And so he had done the only thing he could: he relieved himself in a room crowded with other men needing to do the same, waited his turn for the small alcove in the wall, and sanitized his hands in the most cursory and unsatisfying way possible. That was all that was allowed to him, and he had returned to Barracks 6 feeling abased, filthy, and utterly spent.

He had slept deeply, not even waking to the blast of the klaxon at curfew. Julian knew he owed that to pure exhaustion, rather than any peace of mind, but he was grateful for the reprieve nonetheless. If he had passed another sleepless night, he knew he wouldn't have had a hope of facing the arena with unimpaired reflexes and a clear head. He was going to need both.

The count that morning had been tedious, but it was remarkable how bearable it seemed when Julian was merely ravenous, not famine-stricken. He was in no danger at all of fainting, and when Deyos — after only four false starts — worked his way around to the head of the second line, Julian was prepared for what he had to do. It was a task requiring a delicate touch: just enough insolence to be irresistible, but not enough to earn himself a beating where he stood.

Fortunately, as he had anticipated, the Vorta had proved incapable of passing up the opportunity to gloat. "Well, now, Doctor," he taunted as he stopped in front of Julian. "I understand you're going to be amusing the Jem'Hadar this afternoon. I  _do_  want to thank you for your consideration. It gets rather dull for them, stationed so far away from the action, you know."

The urge to bite back with a blistering retort was almost overpowering. Julian had wanted to point out that if the guards were bored, they ought to have greater consideration for the prisoners, who were practically numb with the monotony of the days. Instead, he had said; "I do hope you'll stop by. I'd hate for you to miss my debut performance."

"Oh, I wouldn't miss it for the entire Alpha Quadrant," Deyos had said with relish, before restarting the count again.

And now there was nothing to do but wait. Julian's insipid and inadequate meal sat like a stone in his stomach. With his nerves in this state, it had been a miracle he'd managed to force it down at all. Only determination and increasingly chronic hunger had enabled him to do so. And then there had been nothing to do but retreat to the barracks and wait.

The door shrieked open, and he jumped at the sharp report. Kalenna snapped to her feet, alert and almost regal in her determination to hide the fear that had been gnawing at her since yesterday. Julian fought to rein in his own galloping pulse as First Ikat'ika strode into the barracks with his escort of two soldiers with their plasma rifles at the ready. He looked down at the seated human, his eyes cold and stern.

"It is time," he decreed.

Julian rose with measured dignity. He had spent every waking moment over the last long Dominion day dreading this, and planning for it, and propping up his courage with perpetual reminders of the necessity of what he was about to do. He let none of that anxiety show as he smoothed the front of his rumpled uniform and squared his shoulders and stepped forward. Martok moved to follow him, and the First cast him a frigidly quizzical look.

"I'm coming with him," Martok said. "Today, I am his sword-bearer."

 _My second_ , Julian thought, remembering tales of high adventure out of Earth's romantic literature. A man entering into a trial of single combat always had a second: a friend who went with him to clean his pistols and count off his paces, and to ensure the customs and rituals of the conflict were properly observed by the other side. There was one more responsibility a second bore, too: he took charge of the body if his champion fell on the field.

"It is unlike you to accept the passive role, Klingon," said Ikat'ika. He was almost sneering. "If you wish to take his place, that can be arranged."

Julian's heart stopped for an awful moment. Everything relied upon today's match drawing the Vorta's interest and dragging on for as long as possible. Martok could do neither of those things, but his pride might not allow him to rebuff the First's suggestion.

The one hard eye focused on the man who had taken the other one. "Whatever you wish," Martok growled. "I am the equal of any Jem'Hadar on in this compound. Even you."

Ikat'ika did not respond with amused scorn, as Deyos would have. But his eye raked down Martok's injured arm, which was out of its makeshift sling but tucked guardedly against his ribs. The First shook his head decisively. "Not today," he said. "The men have been looking forward to testing their mettle against a Starfleet officer, and I will not deny them."

He stood aside, then, and motioned imperiously for Julian to lead the way. It wasn't a gesture of courtesy or respect. It was meant to remind him of his place: he had to go where he was commanded, and he did not have the right to refuse to turn his back to his enemies. He felt the intended shudder of powerlessness, but he did not let it show.

He strode from the barracks, head held high, meeting Kalenna's eyes briefly as he went. He wanted to wink at her reassuringly, but the guards were watching. There was a chance such a gesture might be seen as merely impudent or arrogant, but the slender possibility that it might have been taken as suspicious was too great a risk. Julian offered her a tiny nod instead: an obvious indication of mutual respect and perhaps farewell. She returned it with an air of sober courtesy, ostensibly unaffected. But in his periphery as he walked on, Julian saw that her hands were balled into tight fists at her sides.

The Jem'Hadar were gathered around the ring. They would not have deigned to make way for a prisoner, but they had casually left a clear path between the barracks pod and the ring. Julian followed it, walking the gauntlet of flinty eyes hungry for his downfall. Focused intently on putting one foot in front of the other and in keeping a firm grasp on his courage, Julian did not take notice of the faces on the far side of the crescent until he stopped just short of the lighted lip. Across the arena, watching him with his broad head tilted to one side and a saccharine smile playing on his pale lips, stood Deyos.

It was what he needed, of course. The Vorta's presence out here was the one thing that would give this ordeal any meaning at all. But still, the pure, poisonous pleasure in Deyos's impossibly pale eyes chilled Julian to the marrow and made his buccal tissue shrivel, desiccated with dread. The Vorta was positively jubilant.  _Schadenfreude_ , Julian thought icily. He wondered what the Dominionese word might be for revelling in the suffering of another. He didn't doubt there was one.

Martok was no longer at his shoulder: he had been nudged off to the side, and now stood a metre and a half to Julian's left. One of the Jem'Hadar tried to yank him back behind the front line of spectators. The scaly grey hand closed on Martok's left humerus, just above the outraged joint, but the Klingon warrior gave no sign of his pain. He merely flung the Jem'Hadar off with a broad roll of the shoulder and widened his stance belligerently.

A plasma rifle dug into Julian's back, in the tender hollow of his right shoulder-blade. He was shoved forward violently, and had to choose between taking a step or losing his balance. Awkwardly he hopped over the row of capped lights and into the arena. He took another unsteady step, wanting to get out of prodding range, and then exerted all the control he had over his limbs to square off and stand straight.  _Stand proud,_ he told himself, trying to believe he was commanding, not begging.  _You're a Starfleet officer. They can't make you flinch._

They could, though, and when two heavy boots struck the ground immediately behind him, they almost did. Julian was still resisting the instinctive twitch of his rigid musculature when First Ikat'ika rounded him, prowling predaciously.

"Today, we face a fresh opponent," he announced. Julian realized too late that his brain hadn't made an automatic tally of the gathered crowd. There were seventeen Jem'Hadar in his line of sight, but he did not dare to look around to count how many stood behind him. Turning his head and shoulders, or worse, his whole body, would make him look dazed and vulnerable. Neither his pride nor the strategy he had chosen would allow for that.

"Observe the human," said Ikat'ika, treading a purposeful circle around Julian. He was looking him up and down like a laboratory specimen, and for an instant Julian's fear and determination were overcome by crawling mortification.  _Freak. Freak. Freak._ "He has no cranial crest or armoured ridges. No spinal reinforcement. No secondary rib cage. No exoskeleton. Humans are a biologically inferior species. But do not confuse physical frailty with harmlessness. In the past, humans have proved devious and far more dangerous than their appearance suggests."

It was almost worth the humiliation of standing like a bug under a microscope to hear those words. Julian felt his pride returning. He supposed at least some of the stories circulating along the Dominion grapevine involved his own crew. Captain Sisko, especially, was notorious among the Vorta.

"Observe, analyze and remember," the First instructed. "What we learn here today will serve all Jem'Hadar in combat against his people. His weaknesses are their weaknesses. His strengths are their strengths. His defeat will ultimately be their defeat."

He was probably right about the first and the third part, Julian allowed. He didn't want to think too hard about the second. Nor did he have time to.

"Verat'elar! Come forward," Ikat'ika barked. A Jem'Hadar stepped boldly into the ring, bristling for battle. Julian recognized him as the one who had carried General Martok's gear after the Klingon was released from solitary. He was stretching his neck and flexing his fingers as he came.

Julian moved at last. He was no longer being used as an object lesson in the vulnerabilities of the human body. In another moment or two, he would be embroiled in the fight. He shifted to the side, settling into a loose-kneed stance as he approached the post nearest Martok. The Klingon beckoned to him, and Julian moved nearer, careful not to turn his back on the Jem'Hadar.

"Remember that you must touch the post every time you are thrown to the ground," Martok muttered. Surely he knew that Julian had witnessed enough of these matches to understand the rules, but in this moment, with so many listening ears, it was the only reassurance he could offer. "If you do not, you will forfeit the match."

Julian nodded. He stole a hurried glance back over the General's shoulder. Major Kalenna stood at the very edge of the atrium, right at the mouth of the corridor leading to the barracks. She was positioned where she could watch the match from a safe distance, while keeping her eye on the window behind which Parvok stood guard. When she left that post to join Martok ringside, Julian would know that Tain's work was done, and that the distraction was no longer needed. That was as far as their formal plan went. What happened next would be up to Julian.

One-third of the way around the ring to Julian's left, Verat'elar slapped his post. The electronic gong sounded, and the Jem'Hadar began to advance. Julian hurriedly smacked his own, and took a sliding step to the right and back, following the curve of the ring away from his advancing opponent. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, ready to spring. The guard was crouched low, in a far more aggressive stance. His hands were upheld, claw-like and grasping. Julian watched him as the gazelle watches the lion, leading him in a slow counterclockwise rotation of the ring. Neither of them wanted to be the first one to lunge, knowing the other would take advantage as soon as they did. Julian had edge over Verat'elar in one respect: he knew what the Jem'Hadar would try, while the Jem'Hadar almost certainly expected him to attempt to strike.

Instead, as the slowly mounting suspense grew too much and he dove for the human, Verat'elar was caught off-guard when, rather than duck under his arm or swing a flying fist, Julian leapt to the left and danced out of his reach entirely. He felt a sharp little twinge in his right knee on the landing, but the joint held and he skirted back into the circling stance, now moving clockwise instead. Again, the Jem'Hadar dove. Again, Julian evaded him.

They did this six more times before Verat'elar finally landed a glancing blow. It was meant for Julian's celiac plexus, but it clipped the crest of his pelvis instead, forceful but almost painless. He was moving too swiftly for the Jem'Hadar to gain the upper hand. His opponent could be lightning-quick in the moment he struck, but Julian's sustained, nimble evasion was too far removed from what Verat'elar was used to seeing with the other prisoners. They all knew they were expected to fight, and so they fought: trying to land blows of their own, or to grapple with the Jem'Hadar like wrestlers. Julian wasn't doing any of that. He was focusing his energy and every one of his swift, economical movements on staying out of his attacker's way.

The tactic owed far more to racquetball than to any martial art. Julian was executing pivoting turns and deft sideways leaps that he had perfected on the courts. Eluding an increasingly enraged Jem'Hadar was not really so different from meeting a wildly ricochetting ball, when you came right down to it. Although a ball did not snarl with mounting fury every time you bested it.

He could feel the unrest of the spectators, too. This was a kiss-in-the-ring tactic, and the skill required for kiss-in-the-ring was lost on this audience. They were restive, increasingly bloodthirsty, and every time Julian avoided a blow, a ripple of discontent moved around the circle of hostile faces. On another rapid pass, Julian caught sight of Martok's sombre, strained face, a welcome contrast to the snarling disapproval of the Jem'Hadar. Only Deyos seemed to be enjoying himself. His eyes were dancing with marvelled amusement, and he seemed to be restraining the urge to laugh.

Verat'elar was more affected by the mounting disapprobation of his peers than Julian was. He was feeling the pressure to perform, and every time he failed to strike, his movements became tighter and ever so slightly more erratic. Ordinarily that was a good thing, a sign that a combatant was losing control. But chaos was Julian's foe here: his tactic depended upon being able to predict his opponent's movements. So far, he had done well, but as Verat'elar's methodical approach began to falter, it became harder to evade him.

They had been at this for six minutes, forty-seven seconds according to the careful tally Julian was keeping in his head, when Verat'elar's ongoing tactical analysis of his opponent finally bore fruit. Julian had been watching him intently for almost seven minutes now, anticipating his every movement. Only three blows had even touched him, none of them efficiently. He had not tried to land even one of his own. But they had been at this for a long time now, and despite the stakes, Julian was getting bored. Boredom made him sloppy, and tension made Verat'elar desperate.

The Jem'Hadar feinted to the left, reaching for Julian. Convinced that he was about to attack from the right, the Doctor was prepared when Verat'elar changed trajectory at the last moment. What he  _wasn't_  prepared for was a second feint: as he danced left, Verat'elar abandoned his clockwise attack and came straight for Julian, swinging both arms with the fingers interlaced into a huge hammer of a fist.

It blasted into the side of Julian's head and sent him flying. He crashed down onto his left shoulder, legs scissoring as his hip struck the composite stone floor. Julian flung up his right arm defensively, protecting his head, and tried to skitter backwards as Verat'elar kicked him viciously. The boot aimed for his abdomen struck a hastily upthrust shin instead, and Julian's whole body was momentarily reduced to one small circle in the middle of his fibula. He swallowed any noise of pain even as he scrambled to his feet, as much to evade the next kick as to avoid forfeiting the match. He stumbled to the nearest post, trying to remember how to use a leg that was suddenly hurting far lower than usual. Bowing over the plinth as the gong rang out helped a little. At least it gave him a moment of support while he raked in a frantic breath.

The Jem'Hadar was coming for him again, and Julian skittered out of the way. Verat'elar was enraged now, and he did not change direction quickly enough. He collided with the post, momentarily doubling over it as the gong sounded again. Julian took the opportunity to retreat to the far end of the ring, rubbing at his skull and trying to blink away the stars dancing before his eyes. The time for perfect evasion was over: he was only superficially dazed, but it was enough of an impairment that springing around like a Barzanian antelope was no longer a sound strategy. When the Jem'Hadar came for him again, Julian was firmly planted on his feet and ready for the next phase of the proceedings.

He leaned into the assault this time, thrusting his shoulder under the Jem'Hadar's arm and countering his momentum so that the attempted blow went wild. They locked briefly in that position, legs straining against one other's force as they moved in a tight half-circle. Verat'elar tried to drive a fist into Julian's ribs but the human heard the movement and intercepted, closing a firm hand on the Jem'Hadar's wrist. Then in a sudden shifting of body weight and position, they flung each other off and repositioned, and battle was joined.

Julian had devoted three hours a week over the last few months to brushing up on Starfleet's standard hand-to-hand combat techniques. It was one of those things taught at the Academy that he'd thought he would have little use for in his daily practice, and so it had proved with only a few exceptions — until the  _Defiant_  had been flung into the past by the Orb of Time. A series of improbable events had led to Julian, Miles, Odo and Worf being embroiled in, of all ridiculous things, a barroom brawl aboard Space Station K-7 in the year 2268. Julian had pulled the lateral clavicular branch of his left pectoralis major while incapacitating a disturbingly smooth-headed Klingon. It was a minor hurt, scarcely an inconvenience, but it had irritated him to realize how out of practice he'd become, and he had rectified the situation.

He was glad of that now. As he blocked the Jem'Hadar's blows and brought home a few of his own, Julian found himself making use of several combinations his muscles might not have remembered from his Academy days. With the recent refresher, the movements were second nature. Verat'elar was a far more resilient opponent than the generic holographic roughnecks Julian was used to fighting. He was plainly inexperienced by the standards of his unit, but in the condition he'd been in on K-7, Julian would have been at a decided disadvantage. There was much to be said for proactively addressing deficiencies in one's skill set.

Any other crowd would have been stirred into an energized frenzy by the increased action in the ring. The Jem'Hadar, however, had been more tense and stirred-up during the evasion stage of the fight. Now that the promise of violence was being addressed, they were calmer, watching intently every movement that Julian made in response to their compatriot's assaults. It was unnerving; their silent, watchful stares and the analytical way they tracked the combatants. As Julian's fist blasted into the Jem'Hadar's cheekbone, aimed deliberately high to avoid the ridge of spines that protruded from his jaw, he had to suppress a shudder of unease as the head of every guard in his line of sight tipped from left to right in unison, following the motion.

He'd found a sweet spot, apparently: Verat'elar stumbled, and the knuckles of his lead hand grazed the floor as he tried to counterbalance. Deftly, Julian clasped his hands, clapped his forearms together, and brought both elbows down on the crown of the Jem'Hadar's head. He deliberately restrained himself from exerting the maximum force of impact. In part, he was reluctant to inflict more damage than necessary. More than that, though, he couldn't afford to deal an incapacitating blow so soon. They had been in the ring now for eleven minutes, eight seconds. Tain needed at least an hour, and Julian could not count on his next opponent being so green and inexperienced.

Verat'elar was struggling dazedly to his feet. He groped towards the nearest pylon as Julian backed away to the farthest part of the arena. He was breathing more rapidly than usual, and his pulse was elevated. Sixty beats per minute: he was feeling the exertion, but he was far from overtaxed.

The gong sounded, the Jem'Hadar turned, and battle was rejoined again.

 _(fade_ )

They kept it up for another eight minutes before Verat'elar abandoned any pretext of technique. Julian had been watching his opponent draw nearer and nearer the breaking point, treating the whole thing like a high-stakes exercise in applied physics. Every time he sprang out of the way, or narrowly evaded a blow, or took a punch that should have been enough to floor him almost without flinching because a last minute twist or shimmy had neutralized the bulk of its force, the Jem'Hadar grew angrier. The few successful strikes he landed were going to cost Julian later — he was almost certain the young guard had bruised his ribs, and his head ached where he had taken a couple of hard knocks — but they weren't satisfying enough to take the edge off of Verat'elar's rage.

He had to be painfully conscious of the way this match was dragging on, too. Most were over in just a few minutes: the only prisoner Julian had seen last longer than ten was Martok. And here was the human, who was supposed to be so physically inferior as to be utterly insignificant, still nimbly eluding him seventy-three percent of the time. Whether he understood that he was being toyed with, Julian did not know, but the Jem'Hadar finally reached the limits of his patience.

When he snapped, it was like being pulled out of a structured fight with a disciplined, sentient opponent only to be flung into a pit with a rabid razorbeast. Julian could no longer anticipate even some of Verat'elar's movements: the Jem'Hadar was in a frenzy, diving after him, clawing at him, baring his teeth and tossing his head. His hair was coming loose of its rigid topknot, whipping in dark tendrils around his shoulders. As he dodged a left hook straight into a right cross, Julian reflected dizzily that it was odd that the Jem'Hadar had such luxuriant tresses.

The next blow finally did catch him right under the xyphoid process, and Julian's abdomen exploded with blinding pain. His diaphragm seized as all the air was driven from his lungs in an explosive, strangled burst. His knees gave out and he crashed to the ground, unable to catch himself as his hands clawed instinctively at his middle. Somehow he managed not to fall forward onto his shoulder, but he bowed low over his knees, his field of vision obliterated in bright starbursts of poisoned colour. Primal panic overwhelmed him. He couldn't breathe! He couldn't breathe! His lungs were empty and he couldn't breathe!

He tried, but his chest wasn't functioning as it should. A thin wheeze high in his throat was all Julian could manage. His instincts and the wild voice of animal hysteria were screaming at him, and he buckled lower still as something crashed into the back of his skull. Another weapon, hard and blunt, blasted against his left flank, agonizingly near his kidney. Dimly, distantly, he understood that the Jem'Hadar was still attacking him, but it didn't matter because  _he could not breathe_!

Another voice, not as loud or insistent as the personification of his panic, spoke up.  _All right, so you can't breathe. You'll be able to in a few seconds, once the nerves reset themselves. In the meantime, you've only been without air for seventeen seconds. You've held your breath longer than that waiting to blow out birthday candles. Get away from his feet, get up, get moving again. You have a job to do, Bashir: get off your knees and do it_!

 _But I can't breathe!_ the terrified part of him whimpered.

He didn't listen to it. He couldn't. And the part of his brain that was the keeper and curator of his medical knowledge knew that the stern voice was in the right. Trauma to the celiac plexus was excruciatingly painful and instantly debilitating, but only for a very short period of time. There was no real damage to worry about, only the brilliant agony and the frozen diaphragm. And that muscle was already starting to spasm back to life: Julian choked in a tiny gasp of air, and it gave him the jolt he needed to clamber back onto his feet.

His legs trembled, but they held him. He scuttled away from Verat'elar, who was dazedly trying to figure out where his cringing, vulnerable target had suddenly disappeared to. Julian didn't know if crumpling to his knees constituted a legal fall or not, especially since he hadn't been given any reprieve from the ongoing assault, but he lunged for the nearest post anyway, and smacked it. The gong sounded with its usual intensity, but the sound seemed muffled and distant. The lack of air was beginning to tell on Julian, and he wondered if perhaps it had been a mistake to stand up after all.

Then suddenly his diaphragm came back to life and he gasped, gulping in greedy lungfuls of air. The spots vanished from his vision and his head received a sudden onrush of clarity. His senses seemed heightened: he could hear the eager rustle of the watchers and the heaving respirations of his opponent; he could see every crack and crevice in Verat'elar's horny grey hide; he could feel the chill of the air on his sweat-slicked skin and smell the sour, unwashed undertones of his own body; and he could taste the tinny tang of adrenaline on his tongue.

Already, the Jem'Hadar was winding up into a fresh frenzy. Julian saw it, and dreaded it, and he knew that he had to end this match now if he intended to do so on his own terms. They had only been at it for twenty minutes —  _twenty-two minutes, three seconds,_ the timekeeper in his head nattered superciliously — but if Verat'elar came at him again insensate with rage, Julian didn't know if he'd be able to stop him without doing real harm. He didn't want to hurt the young guard, and the reality was that either way, this match was going to be over in a matter of seconds. Whether in chaos or in calculated precision, it was up to him.

So when the Jem'Hadar charged, Julian stepped dreamily back and to the left. Verat'elar was disoriented with wrath, and he breezed on past. As he went, Julian thrust his foot between the armoured calves. The wild-eyed soldier slammed into Julian's shin, awaking pain where he had kicked him earlier and sending a shockwave of sickening trauma into the knee. But nothing tore and nothing gave way, and Verat'elar crashed to the ground. As he landed, arms upthrust to keep his face from smashing into the floor, Julian swooped down and clipped him with the heel of his left hand, right at the base of the skull.

It was a perfect blow: precisely placed, exerting just the right amount of force. Verat'elar's head snapped forward so his chin bounced off his chest, opening the first vertebral space just enough to pinch the nerve that fed the basal artery supplying his brain with blood. As the blow to Julian's stomach had contracted and paralyzed his diaphragm, so this manoeuvre froze the artery, constricting it. This disrupted the flow of vital fluid just long enough to render the Jem'Hadar unconscious. Verat'elar slumped bonelessly to the floor, the fight gone from his body.

Julian took a staggering step backward, straightening as he went. His chest was heaving and his body was sending out pulsating messages of pain from every place that had taken a blow. Hot perspiration trickled into his eyes and his heart was racing. But he was still on his feet, and his opponent was not. Verat'elar would regain consciousness momentarily; he was already starting to stir, but he wouldn't be able to do so in time to touch the post.

"Victory to the human," Ikat'ika proclaimed. Even over the rush of blood in Julian's ears, the announcement was deafening. Somewhere behind him, General Martok roared in exultant triumph. Julian couldn't even find it in himself to smile.

"Five minutes," said the First; "and we begin again."

( _fade_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**celiac plexus:** a major network of nerves in the upper abdomen. Colloquially called the "solar plexus".

 **pectoralis major:**  a large muscle in the chest, supporting the movement of the shoulder via its  **lateral clavicular branch**.

 **xyphoid process:** a triangle of hard cartilaginous tissue affixed to the bottom of the sternum, just above the celiac plexus.

 **basal artery (exo.):** peculiar to Jem'Hadar physiology, this artery runs along the spinal cord and supplies most of the blood to the brain. Comparable to the carotid arteries in most other species, but supposedly less vulnerable to trauma.


	26. Primum Non Nocere

_Note: This is a dark one. I'm sorry… It's also the reason I updated the archive warnings._

**Part V, Act III: Primum Non Nocere**

Julian knew he had to make the most of his five minutes. He did not think he was permitted to leave the ring, and the cup-like caps on the lights meant he could not sit down on its rim. He slid down the nearest post instead, bracing his back against it so he could sink to the ground with his right leg extended and his left knee raised. He draped his forearm across it, hand dangling, and let his heavy head droop into the crescent of protection as he forced himself to catch his breath. He couldn't keep from pressing the other palm to his stomach where he'd caught Verat'elar's fist. He was still perspiring heavily, and his ribs ached.

A bulky form loomed behind his right shoulder and then descended to his level: Martok, squatting as low as his game hip would allow. After a moment, he reached to prod at Julian's throat with his outstretched index finger. He poked again, and then a third time. For a moment, Julian was perplexed. Then he understood, and he reached to take Martok's hand in his own. He uncurled the middle finger as well, and pressed both to his right carotid artery so that the Klingon could feel his pulse.

"It is slow," Martok said in mild surprise. "Slower than I was expecting, at least."

Fifty-five beats per minute, give or take, and dropping reassuringly. Julian wasn't really paying attention. His breathing was his main concern: he still didn't feel like he was getting enough air. "Physiological differences," he muttered, deliberately nonspecific. Martok seemed to accept it.

"You fought well," he lauded in a low voice, grabbing Julian's shoulder and rocking him briefly from side to side. "The death blow in particular was most gratifying."

Julian's head snapped up.  _Death blow_? But no: on the far side of the ring, Verat'elar was on his feet, stretching his neck from side to side while two of his fellow guards questioned him in hushed voices. Julian let himself relax, tipping his head back against the post and staring vacantly up at the curve of the dome.

Martok made a noise that was neither a chuckle nor a sigh of exasperation. "The  _final_  blow, then," he muttered. "You feared you had killed him?"

Julian shook his head once, tightly. Too much motion didn't seem like a good idea. He was probably going to be dealing with a couple more hematomas of the scalp after this. "I was trying not to," he said. "I meant to incapacitate him."

"Why bother?" said Martok. "He would kill you readily enough."

But he hadn't been trying to kill Julian, either. That wasn't the object of the matches, just an occasional side effect.  _An adverse event, as we say in the trade,_ Julian thought inanely. A dead prisoner couldn't fight again, and as long as the Jem'Hadar needed these bouts for their sanity as well as their skills, there was no sense in a routinely lethal contest.

"I won't kill a man for sport," he said, straightening his head and looking gravely over his shoulder at Martok.

The Klingon regarded him grimly for a moment. "Not even when it is sport of their making, and you are the prey?" he asked.

Julian closed his eyes and leaned against the post again. His pulse was back to normal and his breathing was levelling off. He felt like he could sleep for a week — a Dominion Standard week, at that. "No," he said at last. "Not even then. Not unless it were a choice between his life or mine."

"And if you realize too late that it is, when you can no longer do anything about it?" Martok challenged.

Julian didn't want to face that question. He knew he was capable of killing. He had done it before, with a phaser or the  _Defiant's_ weapon's array. Once, he had even slain a man who wore the face of a friend, blasting him into a splatter of goo with a stolen Bajoran pistol. Sometimes the face of that other Odo, the one who had delighted in tormenting him in the ore processing centre of the mirror Terok Nor, still visited Julian in his nightmares. Yet he had done it, rather than be shot himself, and he knew he could do it again. But there was something about those other means of killing that was detached, impersonal: a phaser or a photon torpedo kept him at one remove from his targets. The idea of killing a man with his bare hands, the hands that were supposed to be instruments of healing, repulsed him. And there was something else, something he couldn't bear to think about even in passing…

"This match will be more difficult," Martok was saying, with the grave efficiency of an officer briefing his men. "They will find you a more experienced opponent. It may not be possible to use the same strategy twice."

Julian nodded, supporting his own head again and hitching himself up with a planted palm so that he was sitting up straighter against the post. His five minutes were trickling away. On the far side of the ring, First Ikat'ika was in close consultation with Fourth Tiratak'nar and the Second. A few metres away, Deyos stood with his arms crossed lazily over his chest. He had a dreamy, vacant look in his eyes that hardened to cold glee when he felt Julian's gaze upon him and shifted his own to meet it. He smiled his slow, dead smile: a boast and a threat all at once. Julian stared at him steadily for twenty measured seconds, and then cast his eyes away in what he hoped looked more like disdain than discomfort.

There was a flurry of motion at Martok's side. Kalenna bent down to the two men, and Julian's heart leapt in sudden hope. Was it possible that Tain had finished already? Less than half the necessary time had elapsed, but there was an old Starfleet joke about engineers padding their estimates in order to look more like miracle-workers when they came in under budget.

Martok's head whipped around to look at her. "Major?" he rumbled.

"No," Kalenna said hastily, her voice scarcely above a whisper as she answered the question they could not ask. "I'm sorry. I just…" She held out a battered metal cylinder to Julian. It was one of his canteens. He took it gratefully, but before he could thank her she murmured; "Good luck!" and was gone.

Trust Kalenna to think of his thirst when the rest of them had forgotten it completely. Now, feeling the cold bottle in his fingers, Julian was intolerably thirsty. He unscrewed the cap and took a shallow, hurried swallow.

"Not too much," Martok advised. "Afterward, you can have all you want, but for now…" He tipped his head pointedly.

Julian knew he was right. A sudden influx of water right before the exertions of the ring would make him cramp up, and if he took another blow like the one that had stolen his wind, he would probably vomit. Still, capping the bottle demanded an act of dour willpower. The spoonful of water he'd taken had been just enough to rouse the Kraken of thirst, and his mouth now felt like sandpaper, begging for more. Athletes commonly rinsed their mouths to combat that sensation, instead of swallowing, but the idea of actually  _spitting out_  a mouthful of his precious water ration was horrifying. It was better to go thirsty. Julian stoppered the bottle tightly and cradled it against his brow instead, relishing the chill on his sore head. He certainly wasn't feeling the cold of the atrium.

A shadow fell across his outstretched shin. Ikat'ika stood over him like the spectre of doom. "On your feet, human," he commanded. "Your five minutes are up."

Julian hurriedly handed the bottle to Martok. He had intended to spring up nimbly, to show himself undaunted and ready for more. He found that his legs weren't prepared to obey him in this, and he had to plant both hands and get onto his knees before he could stand. He resisted the urge to dance from foot to foot to shake the incipient stiffness from his legs, and made a brisk, steady lap around the edge of the ring instead. The break was far longer than the ninety seconds allotted between games in a tennis set, and apparently that meant it was just long enough for his body to start seizing up.

He had been in this place too long. He was getting paranoid. Because as he stretched his arms and kneaded the base of his neck and tried to ready his mind for the ordeal ahead, Julian couldn't help but wonder if the length of the break between bouts was another tactic designed to disadvantage the prisoners.

Luckily, as soon as he was moving he began to limber up again. He'd have to make more judicious use of his next respite: keep his feet and stretch properly.

"It is time for the second match," Ikat'ika announced. "Eighth Talak'ran, step forward."

Julian's chest felt suddenly tight as the broad-shouldered Jem'Hadar strode menacingly into the ring. He remembered this guard from his second day in the prison: Talak'ran was the one who had defeated Trel Lugek, breaking several of the Cardassian's ribs and leaving him unable to stand for the next morning's count. Even without that grim knowledge, Julian would have been stricken with dread. He had gone from facing a young recruit, chosen for scutwork and errand-running, to fighting the Eighth in just one match. The Jem'Hadar weren't wasting any more time putting him through his paces.

He ran his tongue along his teeth, a habitual gesture meant to help him focus. Instead, it sent a shudder of revulsion up his spine. Julian shook off the sensation and forced himself to focus on Talak'ran as the First stepped backwards out of the ring. "Begin!" he barked.

This time, Julian did not wait for his opponent to be the first to strike a post. He reached behind himself, unseeing, and slapped the nearest one. The Eighth did the same, almost hurriedly. And battle was joined.

 _(fade_ )

At first, Julian tried the same tactic of rotation and evasion that he had used in his first fight. But of course, the Eighth had watched him do it and knew exactly what to expect. He didn't engage in the wary chase as his subordinate had done, but sprang across the no man's land in the centre of the ring almost immediately. Caught by surprise, Julian bolted to the right. It was a quick, controlled motion, but he made one miscalculation. In the sports he had so loved in his youth, he always had a prop: the racket was a focal point for his movement and an anchor for his hands. Without one, though he was still just as quick on his feet, it was too easy to forget what he was doing with his arms. The left one trailed behind his hip by less than a decimetre, but it was enough to allow Talak'ran to grab him.

Coarse fingers closed on Julian's wrist, and before he could react his forearm was wrenched up behind him. The Eighth pulled him close, lifting as he did so. Discomfort intensified quickly to pain as Julian's elbow and shoulder were twisted unnaturally. Instinct wanted to pull away, but if he did that, he'd wind up in the same condition as Martok. Julian stepped backward instead, so that his body was pressed up against the Jem'Hadar behind him. The torsion on his arm increased, and Talak'ran struck out with his free right fist. A grunt of pain broke from Julian's lips as hard knuckles crashed into his flank on that side.

But he was already reaching up and back, over his right clavicle. His long fingers found the side of the Jem'Hadar's face, even as their four booted feet scrabbled in a tight, clockwise circle. Julian groped down, trying to visualize Talak'ran's features. The pressure on his arm increased as the Jem'Hadar yanked him still higher. His left heel was momentarily lifted from the ground. Julian leaned in towards his captor, arching his back as he fought for a few more centimetre's reach.

Something crackled in his shoulder; not a rupture, not yet, but a warning creak. Then his fingertips found what he wanted. Julian grabbed hold of the first of the gill-like flaps on the Eighth's neck, and pinched as hard as he could. His nails, now overgrown and sharp, dug in: his thumb anchoring against the tough outer skin while his first three fingers dug in beneath. The flesh there was softer — not as smooth and vulnerable as human skin, but positively tender by Jem'Hadar standards.

Talak'ran hissed in pain and groped for the assaulting hand. Tensing every muscle in his left arm in the hopes of stabilizing his shoulder, Julian drove his left boot backward into his attacker's shin and used the instant of distraction to wrench away. He felt the fingers tighten on his wrist, and for an awful moment he thought they would hold as he yanked his own arm out of its socket, but just as the pressure became unbearable, Talak'ran let go.

Julian stumbled away, all long limbs and entropy. He regained control of his body as he skidded into a sharp turn, transitioning from a forward flight to a backward retreat so that he could keep his eyes on his opponent. He pulled his outraged left arm around to the front of his body, kneading at his shoulder to disperse the hot ache. He stretched and wriggled his fingers, restoring normal nerve function. Nothing was damaged.

The Jem'hadar had his right hand clamped to his neck, but he was already rounding on his adversary, black eyes blazing with hate. He dropped into a half-crouched posture, hands upraised and ready. But Julian wasn't going to let himself be seized so easily twice. When Talak'ran surged forward, he darted out of the way, and this time he made sure to keep his elbows close.

The next four minutes were a frenzy of narrow misses. Again and again, Talak'ran jolted forward, ready to grab or to strike. Always, Julian danced out of the way, but the margin by which he did so grew leaner and leaner. The greater skill and experience of this officer was obvious, as was the fact that the twenty-three minutes he had spent observing the human in action in the previous bout had not been wasted. He was able to anticipate every attempt Julian made to advance, or to gain an advantage, or even to eke out a sliver of breathing room. And Julian was tiring fast.

Genetically enhanced stamina or no, this was a prolonged period of intense exertion. In peak physical condition, Julian might not have struggled thus. But he was tired and underfed, chronically dehydrated, worn down by nine days of constant strain — over a week and a half by the Bajoran reckoning — and by injuries from which he was only just recovering. The ligaments in his right knee felt loose and unreliable, and the pain in that shin where Verat'elar had kicked him wasn't helping matters. When he made a particularly tight pirouette out of the Eighth's onrushing grasp, Julian felt a bolt of hot agony in the healing joint that was almost enough to make him cry out. It faded a moment later as he stabilized his stance, but the sickening sensation lingered high in his chest.

Then suddenly there was a shift in the tide of battle. The Eighth had changed tactics again, adapting. Julian had to duck to the right and fling up both forearms to block a blow that would have clipped him on the side of the head. As he darted forward rather than right, remembering the one-two technique that his previous opponent had used to successfully land a blow, an ironclad knee rose up to blast into the bottom of his ribcage. Julian overbalanced, rolling away from the impact, and he tumbled momentarily to the ground. He scrambled up again almost immediately, but he was once more the first contender to need to reach for a post.

There followed three antic minutes of Starfleet hand-to-hand tactics against the swift, efficient brutality of Jem'Hadar fists. Julian landed his share of blows, even once bringing the hammer of his conjoined hands down on Talak'ran's collarbone with enough force to bring the soldier to his knees. He followed it up with a swift clout to the side of the head, and the Eighth crashed onto his side with sundering force. Julian withdrew hastily to the farthest reaches of the small arena as Talak'ran clambered to his feet and smacked the nearest post. It was a small moment of satisfaction, and it bought him a couple of unlaboured breaths.

But he was taking impacts as well as dealing them. The left side of his head was throbbing where he'd caught a flying fist, and one of Talak'ran's low blows had struck the place where Verat'elar had bruised Julian's ribs. From the way that punch sent the air bursting from Julian's lungs, he feared he would have more to deal with than intercostal contusions. But he gulped in more of the cold, dry air and moved on to the next manoeuvre.

Thirty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds had passed since the beginning of his first match when Julian finally had to resort to the tactics he had been hoping to avoid — not out of any scruples, in this case, but because he knew that as soon as he tried it, he would be inviting similar reprisals from his opponent. Quite frankly, he did not want to be tossed around the ring like a rag doll. But there didn't seem to be any other option. When Talak'ran swooped in to strike again, Julian side-stepped, tucked, and drove his shoulder into the Jem'Hadar's belly.

The guard had the advantage of sheer mass, and an objectively greater brute strength. But Julian had surprise on his side, and a superior grasp of the laws of physics. As he thrust himself against his opponent, crouching to exert the necessary force as he locked an arm around Talak'ran's thigh, Julian spared a moment of gratitude to whatever improbable cosmic mercy had induced the Dominion to program their artificial net to exert a standard M-Class acceleration due to gravity. Too much deviation from what he was used to would have made this calculation infinitely more difficult.

His body was a fulcrum, and Talak'ran's was both load and effort arm. Julian pushed at precisely the right moment, just as the Eight was coiling inward, bending forward to grapple with the invader into his inner sphere of personal space. He overbalanced, and Julian hoisted, and the Jem'Hadar was thrown clear over his shoulder. He made a perfect two-hundred and seventy degree arc, landing flat on his back as Julian skittered to a stop on the far end of the ring. He whipped back around to face his fallen foe, but not before catching a glimpse of General Martok's haggard face suddenly alight with ferocious jubilation.

Julian felt his own face crease briefly into a tight, triumphant smile. He had brought it off perfectly. But the glow of accomplishment was short-lived. Talak'ran was already rolling onto his left hip and groping for the nearest post.

As anticipated, the dynamic of the conflict had shifted. Now, instead of trying to subdue one another with flying fists, they were locked in a savage wrestling match. They grappled with one another's limbs and fought to get a hold of one another's torsos. Julian's best hope was still to elude his captor's grasp as best he could, but he was only moderately successful. In the seventy seconds after the Eighth went down, Julian was thrown twice. Once, he landed in a tight tactical roll, and was back on his feet so swiftly that touching the post was practically a formality. The second time, the Jem'Hadar got one arm behind his head and the other around his thigh and flung him onto his back as a bucking stallion might throw a green rider.

Julian's shoulder-blades hit the ground first, with force enough to wind him. He didn't feel his pelvis land, because the back of his skull smacked the pitiless stone at exactly the same instant, and the world exploded in a supernova of blinding light. He could not think, he could not breathe, and he could not remember what he was doing here or why. The back of his skull was smarting, but the front felt rattled. Scrambled. Julian groped after the elusive certainty that he was supposed to be doing something important just now.

Someone was shouting at him over the roar of tidal waters in his ears. He tried to sit up, rocking his body and reaching out with his left arm for a support that was not there. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. A rail, perhaps? A rope? A hand, he realized, with a sense of dazed desolation. There was supposed to be a hand there to help him up. Whose hand he did not know, but its absence carried him back to darker days, long ago, when there had been no one there to help. He had always had someone in recent years: crewmates, colleagues, friends. Where were his friends when he needed them? Why weren't they here to help him up?

"Doctor, the post!" the voice shouted again, hoarse and percussive. "If you do not get up, the match is over. Get up and touch the post!"

A name floated up through the fog of hurt and hollowness.  _Martok_. He was a friend. But as Julian rocked again, struggling to do as he was ordered, he didn't understand why the Klingon didn't simply help him stand.

 _He can't_ , a more rational part of his mind explained clinically.  _He's not allowed to interfere. They'll stop him if he tries_.

 _Who?_ the lost, bewildered part of Julian's mind wanted to know.  _Who will stop him? Why?_

But it didn't matter. They  _would_  stop him: that was the only important thing to understand. If Julian was going to get up, he would have to do it himself. And he did want to get up, he realized, even if he couldn't remember why. Martok was urging him to do it; surely that was reason enough. The others, all his trusted old friends, weren't here when he needed them, but Martok was. Julian owed him a little consideration for that.

He got onto his hip, and then his knee. He planted his left foot and blinked away the worst of the lightshow from his vision. He could see the post, and the sight of it brought comprehension back. He had to get up and sound the gong, or the match would end and the Jem'Hadar would win. Then Deyos would go back to his office and all would be lost. The details of that were still muzzy as Julian launched to his feet and smacked the top of the post, but he knew it was true. All would be lost.

Talak'ran had not withdrawn to the limits of the ring, as Julian did whenever he floored his opponent. He was not a metre and a half away, looming at the ready. As soon as Julian pushed off the post, swaying dizzily, the Jem'Hadar was coming at him again. He looked even larger and more solidly built than before, and as Julian evaded him clumsily, trying to regroup, he realized with a sinking feeling that he had lost track of the time.

He skirted the perimeter of the ring, blinking away the last of the bleariness so that he could search out Kalenna in the shadowy distance. She was still standing at the mouth of the barracks pod, craning her neck to watch the ring between the shifting shoulders of the Jem'Hadar spectators. Tain was still at work inside the wall, his alterations to the power grid still vulnerable to ready detection.

Julian made another half-lap so that he could reassure himself that Deyos was still ringside. The Vorta was watching him avidly, captivated by the spectacle. It made Julian feel like a circus animal.  _Like a freak_. But he didn't have more than a single beat of his thundering heart to dwell on that, because Talak'ran was coming for him again.

Things were getting desperate. Julian wouldn't be able to keep his feet much longer. He was exhausted and battered, and his strength was failing him. It was getting harder and harder to execute each motion. His limbs felt heavy and his head swam. If he didn't end this match on his own terms soon, he was going to be taken down again, and he was not at all sure that he would be able to recover his feet to continue the match. But he had expended most of his stamina, his dexterity was failing, and he could not match the Eighth for strength. Strategy and physics had served him well, but he knew he was getting easier and easier to predict. There was only one tool left for him to grab, and it was the one he had been hoping to avoid brandishing as a weapon.

His medical knowledge.

In the previous match, Julian had employed it as a means of mitigation, minimizing damage instead of causing it, and incapacitating his opponent harmlessly. He wasn't naïve enough to think he'd be afforded that luxury this time. He wasn't going to bring down Eighth Talak'ran with an anatomical parlour trick. He was going to have to inflict some sort of real, immediate harm and — he thought as he doubled over into another sundering blow to his lower abdomen and reeled off to the left — he was going to have to do it quickly.

He cast a last, imploring glance beyond the ring of watching Jem'Hadar at Kalenna. She saw him do it; she caught his gaze. Her ordinarily stoic face was tight with anguish as she read the question in his wide, desperate eyes. And she shook her head.

More time. They needed more time. And if Julian could end this match in victory, he would win them a full five minutes' respite before the next bout, as well as whatever meagre time he could manage to keep his feet against the next, undoubtedly still more indomitable, Jem'Hadar. It still might not be long enough. It probably  _wouldn't_  be long enough. But Julian had to try.

He dropped into a low crouch as Talak'ran's fist whistled over his head. A booted foot was coming for his face, and he evaded that, too. Improbably, he executed a tight somersault that carried him to the far side of the ring, moving almost between the Eighth's feet. The movement awoke a wave of shuddering vertigo, and Julian was very grateful that Martok had prevented him from drinking too much water: he might well have vomited right now, otherwise. But he had put some distance between himself and his opponent, and won a couple of precious seconds to set up his approach.

He knew what he was going to do, and it filled him with disgust. He was a doctor. He was supposed to use his expertise to save lives, not to inflict crippling injuries.  _Fatal injuries_ , he corrected harshly. There was no use lying to himself. He was going to try his best to avoid that, but the reality was that if he missed his mark by even a millimetre, he was going to end the life of the man in front of him. Even if he didn't, Julian had no way of knowing if the Vorta's medkit and limited expertise would be enough to undo the harm in time. But he could not dwell on that. He could spare no more time for his doubts or his conscience. He was a doctor first, but he was also a soldier. He could do what needed to be done.

Julian lunged.

He moved in as if trying to get another throwing hold, left shoulder dropped so that he could fling an arm around the Jem'Hadar's ribcage and across his thoraic spine. But instead of reaching for the legs or the skull, his right arm tucked in so that it was pressed between Julian's chest and his opponent's. As the Eighth's arms closed around him, grappling for their own counterhold, Julian let his hand slip up. It was a strangely innocuous gesture, such as a small child might make reaching for his mother's cheek. The surreality of that thought helped Julian step one more mental pace back from what he was about to do. He had to remain detached, focused. Clinical…  _oh, God_!

The last three fingers of his right hand curled their slender length about the smooth, supple plastic tube. Forefinger and thumb gripped the flange. His nails dug underneath its edges, feeling for the flat little wings that would give him the leverage he needed. There was an oily grit of dead skin cells under the metal port. Julian wondered inanely whether Jem'Hadar had to floss around the appendage to clean it properly. If so, Talak'ran was negligent in his personal hygiene.

The Eighth had a grip on Julian's back now, splayed fingers digging into the hollows of his ribs on either side of the spine. A nerve misfired into his left arm, incandescently painful. The first three and a half phalanges went completely numb. If Julian had really been trying to throw the guard, he would have been incapable of doing so in this moment. As his lungs constricted against the pressure and the pain, he coached himself in the procedure at hand, just as he had when setting Martok's arm.  _Twist, push, lift, and yank. That's all there is to it: twist, push, lift and yank._

He did it in a single, fluid motion, without a nanosecond's hesitation or another instant of doubt. Twisting the flange as he pushed it deeper into the flesh of the Jem'Hadar's neck, Julian lifted at a precise seven degree angle and, with his grasping pincer and the three fingers gripping the tube, ripped the Ketracel White port from Talak'ran's throat.

The howl of anguish that ripped from the soldier's lungs was deafening. He reared back, releasing his hold on Julian to clutch at his neck. Hot, oily blood spilled over Julian's fingers, and he wanted to fling his hand away in revulsion. Instead, he tightened his fist around the tubing and pulled it viciously. He felt the polymer stretch and deform, and finally tear away from the infusion device embedded in the front of the Eighth's breastplate. The two adversaries were torn apart with it, Talak'ran staggering back as his legs crumpled beneath him, still roaring in anguish. Julian flailed his numb left arm as he skittered backward, the mangled apparatus still clutched in his upraised right hand.

He stared at the Jem'Hadar, now writhing on the ground as blood welled up around the hands that clawed his throat. Torment and horror were overwhelming his training and his battle-hardened self-control. Around the ring, the others were reacting with visceral dismay, chaos slowly brewing in the tightly ordered ranks. Out of the corner of his eye, Julian could see Deyos's expression of shock and unbelief. First Ikat'ika was leaping into the ring.

Pulling out the tube would have been easy: anyone with a firm grip and a strong wrist could have done it. But that wouldn't have done more than slow Talak'ran down. It might even have had the opposite effect: spurring him on to greater violence in an attempt to end the match as swiftly and as brutally as possible before his body used up the last of the essential enzyme that it required at a steady infusion rate. To take him down, Julian had needed to remove the flange itself, and without the knowledge of how it was embedded in the skin and anchored in the musculature and affixed into the wall of the jugular vein, he could not have done it with fingers alone. He had used knowledge gleaned as a doctor, through his efforts to  _help_  these people, to inflict possibly irreparable harm.

He had had no choice, but that didn't make it any easier to bear.

And as he stared at his victim, the other truth came crashing over Julian with the force of a hurricane on Jupiter. Because there was a word for people like him who murdered with their bare hands. His mind still tried to skirt around it, struggling to shelter him from the weight of guilt and self-loathing and repugnance at what he was, what he knew he had been made into and yet sometimes feared he had always been. But another part of him was less merciful, and if it couldn't access that word, it dredged up a name instead. A name that haunted the darkest recesses of half-forgotten nightmares from which Julian could only wake himself by screaming his throat raw. The name of a man, of a monster, of an abomination just like him, who had also used his hands as tools of death.

_Khan._

( _fade_ )


	27. A Labour of Penance

**Part V, Act IV: A Labour of Penance**

The torn tubing with its dangling metal port, shreds of flesh hanging from its anchoring prongs, slipped from Julian's boneless fingers and clattered on the floor. It seemed to be the only tangible item in the Universe, and all that he could do was stare at it as its utilitarian contours blurred and the space about it darkened. He could smell the blood on his hand, and he bestirred himself to look at it instead. A spasm of disgust took him, though he had long ago become inured to the distaste for blood that so many people experienced. Blood from a medical procedure, even without the benefit of surgical gloves, was very different from blood shed in an act of violence. Julian drew his palm in towards himself, intending to wipe off the gore on the front of his uniform so that his hand, at least, could be clean. He stopped himself just in time.

He didn't have fresh clothes to put on, nor any means of laundering these. He would have to endure the clotting ichor on his hand until he could get back to the waste reclamation room and sanitize it. He could clean his skin, if they let him go and do it, but he could not clean his garments.

There was a commotion on the other side of the ring. It wasn't far away — not even four metres. But it seemed very distant to Julian. He could not move, not even to sink to the floor. His limbs felt far removed from his body. He was beginning to shiver. He thought he might be slipping into shock. If that was true, so much the better. It made him feel numb. He wanted to be numb.

But he couldn't bring himself to fade out altogether. First Ikat'ika was down on one knee, bending over the fallen Eighth while three other Jem'Hadar restrained the flailing limbs. Ikat'ika's first two fingers were inside the wound on Talak'ran's neck, buried almost to the knuckles. His own neck was twisted sharply so that he could glare up at Deyos, who had meandered into the ring and was now watching the spectacle with one ear practically resting on his shoulder in a tilt of quizzical interest.

"Do you wish me to intervene, First?" he said unctuously. "I will intervene if you wish it, for the glory of the Dominion."

"You wish to have him killed?" spat Ikat'ika. It was a question and an accusation at once.

"I see no need to kill him," said Deyos. "He fought admirably: he is a credit to the unit. No one could have anticipated that humans have such a savage streak. Besides," he added with a honeyed smile that made Julian's innards roil even more than the previous sentence had done; "if I just stand here and watch, he's going to die anyhow."

"I have stopped the bleeding," the First argued. "There is time to intervene. But without the White…"

"If you  _wish_  me to intervene, I will," cooed Deyos. "You know what I want in return."

Julian didn't, and he felt suddenly that he needed to. The dark nebulas swirling at the edges of his field of vision retreated a little as he studied the expressions of the Vorta and the First. The other Jem'Hadar, at least those who were not occupied in restraining the writhing Eighth, had broken from their vulturine ring. They now stood in scattered knots, three and four together. Despite their armour and the hate in their eyes, their craggy features and the ubiquitous plasma rifles, they looked almost like frightened children huddled together for comfort.

Ikat'ika's eyes blazed blackly. When he spoke, it was a deliberate cadence that was emotionless, unyielding, and blisteringly cold. "I ask that you intervene. You are the Vorta, and we are yours to command. Aid him: as First, I request it."

Julian was expecting something more: a pledge of some service to come, or a sacrifice of some kind. But Deyos nodded coolly. He took something from the pocket of his suit and held it out over the lip of the ring. "Third?" he said boredly. "Fetch the medical kit from my office. Do not dawdle. Do not snoop."

"Return at once," the First commanded, as his junior stepped forward to take what looked like the Dominion equivalent of a control chip or an isolinear data rod. " _Run_."

The Third ran. Julian tracked him with his eyes until he moved out of his field of vision. He did not dare to turn his head. Would the Third pause to look at the Vorta's computer terminal on his way to fetch the medkit? Would he notice anything amiss if he did? Tain was still in the wall: by moving his eyes to the other extreme, Julian could just see Kalenna, far away in the gloom.

But he did not think he had cause to worry. If Deyos had gone for the kit himself, there would be a substantial risk. The Third, on the other hand, was likely just as shell-shocked as all the others, and he would focus on fetching what he needed to aid his subordinate, as quickly as possible. Julian's gaze travelled sickly back to the man he had mutilated. From this distance, it was impossible to tell whether his extraction had been precise or sloppy; whether he had shredded the jugular vein or merely ripped a hole in it. He wanted to believe Ikat'ika's assessment that the bleeding was under control, but he did not quite dare to.

He wanted to run to Talak'ran's side, to offer his aid and do what he could, but Julian was paralyzed. What right did he have to touch that man? He was the reason the Eighth was lying there, bleeding and in agony. He would already be feeling the first throes of withdrawal, and the trauma only heightened his need for Ketracel White.

The Third came back, sprinting fleetly as if completely unencumbered by his armour. He had a flat, rectangular case in his hands, and he gave it hurriedly to the Vorta, who cast a cool eye on the kneeling First.

"Step back and let me look at him," he said, casually contemptuous.

Ikat'ika shook his head. "Not you," he growled. With the hand not buried in his subordinate's neck, he pointed wrathfully at Julian. " _Him."_

"Him?" Deyos parroted, curling his lip and looking Julian over. " _He's_  got other matters to attend to. He's still undefeated, you know. He's due back in the ring with a fresh opponent in… two and a half minutes?"

He looked around as if expecting one of the Jem'Hadar to confirm his estimate. Not one of them did.

"The ring is  _occupied_ ," snarled Ikat'ika. "His third match can wait. You!" He fixed a searing glare on Julian. "Get over here and treat him!"

"I don't know  _what_  you're thinking," sneered Deyos. "He's the one who made this mess in the first place."

"Then it is fitting he should clean it up!" Ikat'ika snapped. Julian was not sure he had ever heard a Jem'Hadar take that particular tone with a Vorta before.

Deyos shrugged expansively. "Very well," he said, tossing the medkit to the floor and tugging fastidiously at his cuffs. "I'd just as soon not get myself soaked in Jem'Hadar blood, anyway."

He stepped out of the ring. Julian had a moment to be terrified that he was heading back to his office, but the part of his brain that was still a physician — not a soldier, not a conspirator, not a prisoner, not a monster — was already in control of his body. He hastened forward and dropped to his good knee before placing the bad one, his pains scarcely registering as he slid hip-to-hip with Ikat'ika, and reached for the case. His left arm was slow to obey him, so he flipped back the clasps and lifted the lid with his right.

He didn't recognize any of the instruments. That should not have come as a shock, but Julian hadn't paused to consider it until now. They all had different casings than the Federation, Bajoran and Cardassian models he was familiar with, and all of the narrow, vertical labels on the neat foam cradle that held them were in Dominionese. He grabbed a triangular device that simply had to be a medical scanner, and planted his thumb on the smallest of the three display surfaces. It crackled to life.

"You need to tell me which tools are which," he said, glancing up at Deyos while the scanner beeped and cycled in his hand. "I'm going to need something to repair the blood vessel — an autosuture or a cellular bonder. And either an atomizer or a suction device. And an anesthetic he can tolerate. If you don't know which ones the Jem'Hadar can have, read me the names and the chemical components."

Deyos looked affronted, but he was making no move to walk away. Julian squinted at the little screen in his palm. The words were senseless gibberish: dots and lines and swirls that meant nothing to him. But by sheer force of luck he had found the imaging setting. As he moved the device nearer to Talak'ran's throat, a rotating multiplane image of the wound appeared on the screen. He could see the bones and vessels of Ikat'ika's fingers in the tunnel of old scar tissue, and he could visualize the left jugular vein. The hole that the First was pinching off was slightly elliptical, its edges smooth except for two hairline tears at eighty and two hundred and sixty degrees.

Julian swallowed painfully against a parched, burning throat. His angle had been accurate and his movement precise: he had not destroyed the vessel.

"He needs an anesthetic!" he insisted, his voice more forceful now. He had done an unconscionable thing, a deed that would haunt him. But he had done it properly, and now he had an opportunity to fix it. "Get down here and tell me what I've got to work with!"

"We do not give  _medications_  to the Jem'Hadar," Deyos said scornfully. "His metabolism would be unable to assimilate such chemicals: they would be eliminated immediately as toxic waste."

Julian stared up at him again, horrified. "This man is in pain. He's got his commander's hand inside of his neck. I have to give him something!"

"The White is the only thing we need," muttered Ikat'ika darkly. "You have deprived him of that."

There was no room in the mind of Doctor Bashir for the doubts and recriminations that plagued Julian. The time for regret was later. There was only medicine now, and the high-stakes interspecies troubleshooting that had been the focus of the last two years of his training.

"Then get me some White," he said, abandoning the scanner on the flat of the Eighth's hip so that he could fish in the medkit. There was nothing even vaguely resembling an intravenous infusion cuff, but he found a handful of sterile vacutainers of the sort used to receive blood samples, and a device with a hollow handle that had to be the Dominion's version of a hypospray. "We can transfer it into one of these, and administer the dose he needs manually."

Somewhere in the distance, he heard a familiar hiss of warning. Too late, he remembered Martok and the others, and realized he had just commanded the Vorta to go back to his office where the canisters of Ketracel White were surely kept — where the computer terminal that was the cause of all this butchery stood vulnerable.

But Deyos did not obey. He crossed his arms, looking like a petulant playground monitor. "He has already received his allotment for today," he said primly. "If I issue him another cartridge, it will be unfair to the other men."

Julian wanted to launch into one of his impassioned lectures on the paramount importance of medical expediency, which took precedence over everything else, "fair" distribution of the most perniciously addictive substance he had ever come across included. But he knew it would be futile. Instead, he passed off the tool and the slender, sterile vial into his left hand. It was heavy and slow to close, and his shoulder ached mutely from the effort. Puzzled, Julian kneaded the joint with his thumb, but it seemed to be intact. A wave of feeble nausea washed over him, and he swallowed hard against it. He had work to do.

He nudged still closer to the First and reached with his dominant hand for the infusion apparatus on Talak'ran's armour. His fingers slipped on a bubbling wetness too cool and chalky to be blood, and when he drew them back, they were smeared with the milky fluid that had spilled from the cartridge the Eighth had been wearing. It must have ruptured when Julian tore the tube away.

The First had been watching Julian's hand intently. As he drew back, Ikat'ika groped at his own collar. There was a faint hiss of equalizing pressure, and he removed the goose-necked vial from his own device. He shook it, stirring and then settling about a millilitre and a half of solution: a little more than a quarter of the vial's capacity. He handed it to Julian.

"Give him this," he said grimly, then looked resolutely away.

Julian stared at him, dumbstruck. "But you need this," he said softly, almost reproachfully.

Ikat'ika kept his eyes on the Eighth's contorted face. The wounded guard's chest was heaving spastically and his efforts to flail against the men holding him down were weaker. " _I,"_ he said tersely; "am not in pain."

"Jem'Hadar do not feel pain," Deyos said scornfully. His eyes narrowed as he glared at the First. "And redistribution of the White is strictly—"

"Once you entrust me with the daily allotment of the White, its distribution is my prerogative," Ikat'ika growled. "Do what must be done, prisoner."

It took Julian two attempts to find the extraction and infusion controls on the hypospray-like device. The fanlike cap on the vial was not removable: he knew better than to try. Once he had the vacutainer ready, he simply wrapped his uncooperative left hand around the base of the cartridge, and used his right to snap off the top third as if it were an old-fashioned glass ampule. He fleetingly hoped that no one would question the force required to do this so neatly, but at this point Julian supposed it didn't really matter.

He couldn't draw up all of the fluid: indirect-contact pressure infusers had a limited range, and he had no means of creating a sterile membrane. But there was only a thin scum of Ketracel White at the bottom of the canister when Julian was finished. He hesitated momentarily over the dose, although he was quite confident in his ability to decipher the Dominionese digits to dial it in. A shorter dosage interval was preferable.

"What unit of measure does this device use?" he asked. Deyos was looking shrewdly from one knot of watching Jem'Hadar to another and did not seem to have heard. "Listen to me!" Julian said sharply. The Vorta turned his head languidly, the thinnest of loathsome smiles on his lips. "If you want me to help him, you need to answer my questions."

"You will not be the judge of what I  _need_  to do, human," Deyos hissed. But his eyes flicked rapidly to Ikat'ika, and he said; "It is set to administer doses by volume. One Dominion ekate is equal to two of your Federation microlitres. If you prefer to measure by mass, I can adjust it."

Julian wasn't sure he trusted this man to be an expert on inter-Quadrant unit conversions, but he had no way of confirming or refuting what he had been told. He selected the numbers he wanted and then held the device so that Ikat'ika could look at it without turning his head back towards the disdained prisoner at his side.

"Is this six point one-two-five ekates?" he asked.

A Jem'Hadar First in command of a battalion of internment camp guards was a poor substitute for a pharmacist, but Julian trusted him more than he trusted the Vorta. Ikat'ika, at least, had proved himself invested in the survival of this patient. When he nodded, grunting irately, Julian reached across Talak'ran's body to pressure in the dose directly to his other jugular vein. He did so warily, conscious of the fact that it was only the might of the other three glowering Jem'Hadar that was keeping the deranged and struggling patient immobile. But as soon as the faint  _hiss_  of the ersatz-hypospray sounded, the Eighth relaxed. His eyes, which had been flailing wildly, rolled up into his head as his lids drifted low, and he let out exactly the low, rapturous moan that Julian associated with a narcotic addict who finally got his fix. His whole body sagged, and the Jem'Hadar holding him down looked at one another as if uncertain how to proceed.

"Keep light pressure on his limbs, and be prepared to hold him securely again if he moves while I'm working," said Julian. "You—" He nodded at the guard kneeling on his patient's other side, restraining arms that no longer needed it. "In exactly five minutes, I need you to give him another dose. Put the bulb against his throat exactly where I did, and depress the lower control. Understood?"

The Jem'Hadar cast a questioning look at his First, who nodded tightly. "Understood," he said, taking the proffered device. Then for good measure, lest Julian forget his place, he added; "Prisoner."

Julian didn't bother to shoot him a long-suffering look. He was watching Talak'ran's slack face. The Eighth was still conscious, but obviously spent.  _Jem'Hadar do not feel pain, indeed_ , he thought bitterly, his hatred of Deyos deepening. If this man's response to sudden relief was not proof enough that he had been in anguish, Julian did not know what might convince the Vorta. So it was with more venom than was objectively wise to display that he snapped; "Are you going to find me the tissue regenerator, or not?"

"It's the one with the green band on the handle," Deyos drawled, rolling his eyes to show how tiresome he found this human's antics. Julian snatched it up and thumbed the controls. This time, he found the one he wanted on the first try, and the dainty laser flickered from the device's hammerlike front.

"Move around to the crown of his head, please," he said to Ikat'ika. "On my count, I need you to pull your fingers out of the wound, quickly but steadily. Make sure they come out at exactly the same angle you put them in."

As he prepared himself mentally for the rapid decisions and precision motions of field surgery, Julian looked up once more at the Vorta. "Is there a new port I can put in for him?" he asked.

Deyos sneered. "We don't do those kind of procedures here.  _I'm_  not a doctor. I'm an internment camp administrator — one of the best."

There was no point to any of this if Julian could not replace the shunt. Before he could muddle through the frantic series of questions and worst-case scenarios, Ikat'ika said dourly; "The next supply ship is not due for eighteen days."

"Three days," said Deyos lazily.

Julian's head snapped up. "What's that?" he said breathlessly.

"There will be a ship arriving in  _three_  days," Deyos said. "There has been a… special request. Tiellyn is coming. She can bring a new shunt, and install it. If  _he—_ " He nodded contemptuously at Talak'ran. "—can endure that long without the White."

"Who is Tiellyn?" Julian asked.

"A Vorta doctor," muttered the Jem'Hadar to whom he had given the pressure infuser. Julian was surprised to hear him volunteer such information, with the First and the Vorta at hand.

"A  _qualified_  doctor," Deyos said pointedly, flicking his eyes up and down Julian's rumpled and dust-smeared uniform to indicate that he was anything but. "One who is  _experienced_  in the care of Dominion citizens."

"He will not live three days without the White," muttered Ikat'ika, staring down at the Eighth's slack face. "Not in this state."

"He won't have to," said Julian firmly, trying to catch the First's eye and failing utterly. "You can keep dosing him as I just did. It's going to require frequent administration of the drug, but it can be done."

"Every five minutes?" Deyos laughed. "I'm sorry, Doctor. Eighth Talak'ran is an experienced soldier who represents a tremendous investment of resources over almost a decade, but  _no_  Jem'Hadar is worth that kind of trouble."

"I can prescribe a higher dose, administered less frequently," Julian said. He didn't add that he could not in good conscience recommend administering it very  _much_  less frequently. That was a conversation he could have with the First out of the Vorta's hearing. Exaggeration wasn't obfuscation, and anyhow he would not have had any compunctions whatsoever in lying to a man who considered sentient life so utterly disposable. "I just want to give him sufficient support while I operate, since you insist he can't be properly anesthetized."

Deyos rolled his eyes again. "Very  _well_ ," he said exasperatedly. "Do hurry up: you're wasting time."

He was, Julian realized with something approaching wonderment. He was running out the clock on Tain's little project, and he was doing it on his knees, practicing medicine, instead of circling the arena with a bloodthirsty Jem'Hadar, trying to stay upright and alive long enough for the Cardassian to finish. The dull, pulsing throb in his skull that he had been so studiously ignoring eased appreciably. Reinvigorated and freshly hopeful, he nodded to Ikat'ika.

"On my count," he said. "One, two, three…"

 _(fade_ )

There was only so much he could do, and it didn't take very long. Julian closed the hole in the vein with little trouble, as well as the places where skin and muscle had torn as the barbed port was ripped away. The tunnel of scar tissue presented a more difficult problem, however. Talak'ran had been fitted with the flange upon reaching physical maturity at the age of about two weeks — almost a decade ago, if Julian had heard the Vorta correctly. The flesh around it had long since hardened and adapted. Julian would have needed a dermolytic scalpel and a myelin regenerator to close the hole completely. He could have tried to fill it with a graft, if he'd had a sterile procedure room and a biobed and a competent surgical nurse to aid him. Covering the hole with a skin flap was an invitation to an abscess.

In the end, he left the tunnel open almost to the vein, using the dermal regenerator to fashion a close-fitting drum of tissue over the blood vessel itself. This was a tricky manoeuvre because of the angle involved, and because his left hand was getting steadily less reliable. He could hold it perfectly still, thankfully, but any movement was clumsy, stilted, and awoke a knot of nausea in the middle of his chest and a strange, ghosting sensation into his back. Julian didn't have time to think about that.

The Jem'Hadar on the Eighth's other side administered a dose of White once during the procedure, and again while Julian was affixing a sterile pad over the mouth of the loosely-packed gap in Talak'ran's neck. The entire repair had taken only ten minutes.

Now that it was over and there was nothing more he could do for his patient, Julian's mind was free to lapse back into its own problems. He eased back on his heels, feeling the dull pain in his right shin and knee as he did so, and stole a glance at Martok. The Klingon was still standing on the far side of the ring, watching the strange spectacle with stern vigilance. Beyond him, past two clutches of glaring Jem'Hadar, Kalenna was still standing rigidly at the edge of the atrium. She looked back towards the door to Barracks 6, and then across to the arena. She was doing an admirable job of appearing calm, but Julian could see the tension in her body from where he knelt.

Eighth Talak'ran was sitting up, pulling back from the two guards who had been controlling his legs. His hand drifted up to his throat, feeling the place where the Ketracel tubing should have been. He looked at his First, and Julian had never before seen a look of such bewildered desolation on a Jem'Hadar's face.

"Were you listening to our discussion?" Ikat'ika asked. He did not wait for an answer. "The Vorta doctor is arriving in three days: she will fit you with a new apparatus then. In the meantime—" He reached across the Eighth's lap and plucked the Dominion hypospray from the fingers of the other Jem'Hadar. He held it up for Talak'ran to see. "I will administer your White in small doses."

There was a tightness in his voice that hadn't been there before, and Julian knew he was already feeling the absence of the drug in his own system. Judging by the amount in his tube when he'd removed it, he didn't have more than nine hours to wait for his next dose, but Julian was well aware that would feel like an eternity.

Not for the first time, he was caught off-guard by the selflessness of a Jem'Hadar First in caring for his men. His surprise disturbed him. In a similar situation, if such a thing could be imagined in a free society that didn't feel the need to ensure its soldiers' loyalty by creating a crippling chemical dependency, Captain Sisko would not have hesitated to make such a sacrifice for a wounded officer. That Julian didn't automatically ascribe the same noble attributes to the Jem'Hadar surely said something unflattering about his ingrained prejudices.

The five guards around him were all on their feet now, and Talak'ran stepped carefully out of the ring. He was moving with an exaggerated precision that Julian recognized: he was trying not to tremble.

"Return to the staging area," the First instructed him in a low voice, sliding a sidelong look towards Deyos, who was now pacing idly a few metres away. "I will speak to you there shortly. You," he added, jerking his spined chin at the one who had been in charge of the Eighth's left leg; "accompany him."

They moved off, and the other two trotted away to join one of the tense, loitering knots. Ikat'ika stared contemptuously down at Julian and thrust the pressure infuser towards his face.

"You said you would adjust the dose for a longer interval," he said.

Julian nodded unsteadily. His own physical miseries, sublimated and forgotten in the magical reverie of triage, were returning. His left flank and his abdomen ached deeply, and he felt a sharp, spreading pain in his ribs whenever he drew too deep a breath. His head felt like a bruised melon, already going soft, and his left arm seemed to weigh twice as much as it should.

"We could try to dose him every half an hour," he murmured, making the appropriate adjustments to the Dominion hypo. "But…"

"But our bodies use the White as quickly as it is supplied," muttered Ikat'ika. He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, looking in that moment more like one of the captives than the commander of the guard. His eyes were tracking Deyos. "Just give me your instructions. If he needs it every five minutes, I will see that it is done."

It was on the tip of Julian's tongue to suggest that the device could simply be given to Talak'ran for self-administration. Then he reconsidered. You couldn't hand an addict, especially an addict who had recently been through a significant physical trauma, the keys to the medicine cabinet.  _A significant physical trauma?_  a vicious voice sneered.  _He was maimed. You maimed him. You did this: you. What does it matter if you've patched him up? You didn't fix it. You didn't undo what you did. You've just put a plaster over a disruptor wound, and now someone else has to finish what you couldn't. Failure. Monster. Mutant._

"It should be tolerable to stretch it to fifteen," Julian said hollowly, dialling in the new dose. The Dominionese numerical characters swam before his eyes, and he took a hitching, painful breath. When he passed the tool back to Ikat'ika, his right hand was quaking. "Eighteen point three-seven-five?"

Ikat'ika eyed the display and grunted his agreement. he nodded at the medkit with its scattering of loose equipment. "Clean up your mess, prisoner," he said coldly.

Julian obeyed, working one-handed when his left refused to lift itself out of his lap. He had a feeling that he should be feeling pain from that quarter, and he wondered again if he was slipping into shock. The fingers of his right hand were smeared with crusted cruor, and his nailbeds were black with the Jem'Hadar's blood. He swallowed a hot gurgle of acid burning up from a stomach that had rapidly emptied itself of his frugal daily meal. His consciousness was sawing miserably against exhaustion and desolation of spirit. He wondered wretchedly if Tain was finished yet.

"Where are you going?" Deyos's voice was sharp with annoyance. "He's still undefeated!"

"I can fight him tomorrow," Ikat'ika said frostily. He was marching away towards the administration corridor, and he did not look back. "I have other business to attend to."

"Other business?" Deyos huffed, looking indignantly around even as Julian started to panic. He wasn't sorry to be spared a third bout, but if the Vorta went back to his office now, before Tain's work was done… He turned frantic eyes towards his barracks. Kalenna hadn't approached the ring yet. She caught his wild glance and shook her head rapidly, trying to cover her own mounting panic.

"Deyos!" Julian croaked, but his throat was tight and burning, and he managed little more than a whisper. As he swallowed desperately, preparing to try again, the Vorta snapped an imperious finger at the nearest knot of Jem'Hadar.

"Second!  _You_  will take the First's place in the ring," he decreed decisively. "And you two, get the prisoner on his feet. The Dominion does not yield: its enemies yield. The fight will continue as planned!"

He swooped in, swift as lightening, and snapped the medkit closed so quickly that Julian scarcely had time to snatch back his fingers before they were pinched by the lid. Deyos paused, nose to nose with him, his breath hot and faintly fruity. Ketoacidosis, or did the Dominion provide its commandants with fresh foods? Julian blinked at him, aware his mind was wandering off into the weeds.

"Good luck, human," the Vorta sneered, his voice a low and noxious whisper. "The Second is not as gifted as our First, but neither is he as disciplined. In his last five matches, he has had three fatalities. It's a problem, really it is," he added with relish. "So much  _administrative work_  when a prisoner is killed."

Then he turned sharply on one polished heel and strolled out of the ring, slinging the strap of the medkit over his shoulder as he settled in his prime place to observe the arena.

Rough hands seized Julian by the arms, and only then was he conscious of the two massive Jem'Hadar who had come up to flank him. They yanked him to his feet, and all thought was obliterated by an eruption of horrible, incandescent agony as Julian's weight was thrust upon his arms.

His shoulder held. His collarbone held. But hot and violent anguish exploded across Julian's left trapezius, up and down his spine and into his neck and straight through his heart into the caudal aspect of his ribcage. Julian's lips parted and he felt certain he was going to cry out, perhaps even to scream, but nothing emerged but a strained wheeze of air. He struggled to get his legs under him, knowing that was the only way to take the weight off of his arm. His mind was working again, but it was as panicked and chaotic as the triage cavern on Ajilon Prime had been when the Klingons started shelling the hospital. A dozen frenzied voices shouted out desperate, terrified questions, and not one of them had an answer.  _What's happening? What is this? The joints are intact, the bones are intact, what is this pain? What could possibly cause this pain?_

But he was standing now, and the guards had released him. Julian reached across his chest to clutch his left arm against his side. The hand at the end of it was numb. Even his elbow was tingling with distant neuralgia. All of the pain was coming from the left expanse of his upper back. He stood there, left shoulder dropped and right shoulder hunched, body curled slightly forward, protective of itself even when his mind couldn't remember what part he had to protect.

Julian let one boot skid away from the other, planting his feet more broadly to brace himself while he swayed. Perspiration coursed down his temples, and his eyes were watering with torment. He fought for every breath as he looked wildly around. The Jem'Hadar Second was climbing into the ring, teeth bared and eyes glittering. Julian scuttled backward, instinctively trying to put as much distance between himself and the foe as he could. He knew he wasn't seeing a person in his opponent now: only the menace of suffering and death. He didn't think he'd be as scrupulous this time. He tried to batten down the yawning cargo hold of terror that the inexplicable anguish had ripped wide.

"Doctor…" a familiar voice muttered, almost in his ear. There was a warning note to it, a thread of an anxious question, and a rasp that Julian was beginning to think he would recognize even from beyond the grave, when he arrived in the afterlife about three minutes from now. But he couldn't speak to Martok, and he didn't dare to turn around. He released his frantic hold on his dangling left arm, noting again no grinding or instability in the joints. As the Second sounded the gong on the other side of the ring, Julian groped back to find his own post.

 _Bong_. The electronic tone resounded in his ears and through his burning chest. Julian sucked in one last, steadying breath and readied himself. The Second moved clockwise, dropping into a low, tactical crouch. Julian shifted in the same direction, a pitiful parody of the opening of his first match that seemed to have been held a thousand years ago instead of scarcely an hour. But he was grateful of the motion, because it gave him one final, unobstructed view of the corridor that led to Barracks 6 and the improvised transmitter.

Kalenna was still at her post, watching from a distance in dread.

 _(fade_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**dermolytic scalpel (tech.):** a tool used to break down skin cells prior to tissue regeneration.

 **myelin regenerator (tech.):** a tool used to regenerate muscle tissue.

 **abscess:**  a closed pocket of infection inside the body.

 **cruor:** the deeply coloured portion of clotting blood.

 **caudal aspect:** towards the "front" side of the body: face, chest and abdomen.


	28. Trauma and Assessment

**Part V, Act V: Trauma and Assessment**

Julian scarcely had time to brace for impact before the Second charged into him like an oncoming torpedo. He did manage to shift the angle of his body so that the Jem'Hadar slammed into his right shoulder instead of his left, but that only did so much to mitigate the jarring pain that tore across his upper back. He grunted as he was pushed back towards the lip of the ring, leaning frantically into his opponent as he fought to keep his legs from buckling. A fist, hard and heavy as iron, blasted into his side, just below the right floating ribs. Julian's forehead bounced against the Second's breastplate as his body tried to double over against the blow and discovered there was nowhere to go.

His right hand flew up, grappling for a hold on the back of the Jem'Hadar's neck. He had no thought but to pull himself upright and regroup, but with a viper's reflexes, the Second jerked away and seized his arm, twisting it and lifting. He pushed off, and drove Julian to his knees by the sheer force exerted on his forearm and elbow. Julian didn't fight it.  _Not my arm_ , he thought frantically.  _He can't break my arm. I don't even know what's wrong with the other one yet_.

Luckily, the Second didn't seem interested in the limb except as a means of subduing his attacker. As soon as Julian was on the ground, the Jem'Hadar kicked him savagely in the abdomen. He struck too low to hit the celiac plexus, but Julian crumpled nonetheless, his brow brushing his knees as he collapsed forward over his lap. His right palm smacked the floor and he tried to push himself back up, but two knotted fists came down on the back of his head and he rolled onto his side, gasping and disoriented. The boot struck him again, this time squarely in his left pectoral muscle, and the dizzy fragments of the atrium he could see around his defensively curled right arm grew very dark.

He didn't know if he actually greyed out, or if that was only an illusion caused by a disoriented moment of temporal displacement, with a few seconds seeming to stretch on into sightless eternity. But Julian wasn't so dazed that he had forgotten the reason for all of this otherwise senseless pain, and he fought to rock back to the left so he could push himself onto his knees again. He tried to use both hands to clamber to his feet, but the left would not obey him at all anymore. The agony on that side was now a column of nebulous fire driven like a stake through his body, from nipple to shoulder-blade. He knew that ought to tell him something important about his condition, but as there had been no time for remorse while he treated the Eighth, so there was no time for differential diagnosis while he was fighting for his life.

Julian exerted a great surge of will and every shred of strength left to him, and he hoisted himself up off the ground. He was bent almost double and swaying from side to side like a troll, with his left arm dangling and his right clutching his belly, but he stumbled to the nearest post and struck it, turning as he did so to seek out his opponent.

The Second was weaving to and fro on limber feet. His thickly muscled legs looked solid as tree trunks, and his arms were at the ready. Julian watched them as he would have watched a plasma rifle trained between his eyes. They were the deadliest weapons in the ring, and he had to keep them in his sight.

He was groggy and unsteady, his chest heaving and hitching with the effort to draw breath. He couldn't think clearly enough to strategize, not through the fog of agony and exhaustion. But when the Second came for him again, Julian's legs remembered something his mind couldn't quite grasp, and he sprang out of the way. There was no wall with a bright neon target to bounce off of, no whistle and  _clonk_ of a ricochetting rubber sphere, but it was a racquetball manoeuvre all the same, and it worked. The Second could not turn in time, and he whisked past Julian's right side as the human skittered away and struggled again to regroup.

"Well done!" someone snarled, a vehement but very distant voice. "Well done, Doctor!"

Julian couldn't imagine who had possibly spoken: all he could see, all around the borders of the arena, was an ocean of hostile, spiny faces. The Jem'Hadar were hungry for his blood, and their Second intended to oblige them. He darted for Julian again, and this time the Doctor evaded him by a far narrower margin. The impact of his landing jarred his whole body, awakening every individual pain at once — not ferociously, but perniciously. Julian reeled, fighting to keep his feet, and his hip smacked the nearest post.

The hand came out of nowhere, and as it closed about his throat, Julian could not understand how he had possibly lost track of it. Steely fingers gripped him just below the jaw. Thumb and forefinger pressed in on either side of his larynx, awaking a new, horrible pain that, in its immediacy and its deadliness made all the other agonies fade into insignificance. Julian tried to breathe, and managed only a thin, painful wheeze. Then the Second began to lift, hoisting him into the air.

His weight was thrust onto his mandible, and Julian could feel the joints of his jaw stretching and straining and struggling to hold. His neck was stretched and tractioned by the weight of his body as first his heels, and then the balls of his feet were lifted off the ground. Panic and outrage gripped him — not anger or wrath, but  _outrage:_ his mind rebelling against the offence of this position, the unnaturalness. He was choking, strangling, he was sure of it. Although he sucked in another meagre measure of air through vocal chords that burned as if they were wreathed in flaming plasma, Julian was certain that he was going to suffocate.

Something shifted between his second and third vertebrae, and his mind's eye was momentarily eclipsed by the image of the Hunter in his red battle suit, neck canted horribly to once side. The Second had done that, and now it was Julian's turn. At the same time, in the three agonizing seconds that it took him to be hoisted from flat feet to the tips of scrabbling toes, his physician's mind was nattering on at him about dislocated jaws and ruptured larynxes and the long, agonizing death of slow drowning as his throat filled with blood. The Jem'Hadar's thumb was more medial on his throat than the fingers were, impinging on the right carotid artery. Julian's left eye seemed to bulge and throb, and the world grew very grey on that side — greyer even than the utilitarian Dominion decor demanded.

 _Well, well!_  some sarcastic part of his mind sneered nonsensically.  _Who's Khan now?_

Julian did the only thing he could think of, in the circumstances. He grabbed the Second by the wrist, and tried to hoist himself higher. It was the only way to alleviate the pressure on his throat and his jaw. The fingers of his right hand clamped tightly, and it seemed that his left arm could still work after all, at least under deadly duress: it flew up as well.

On Invernia II, where Julian had spent most of his tenth year as the only human child in an embassy classroom full of the offspring of the sort of Federation diplomats relegated to remote postings on minor unallied worlds, the indigenous population had a tradition of adrenaline sports. One of the most popular, and Julian's especial favourite, had involved the rapid climbing of elaborate courses suspended in the lower canopy of the vast deciduous rainforests of the equatorial continent. Constructed of platforms and beams, ropes, vines and ladders, the courses were exhilarating and challenging, engaging the mind and using every part of the body. Julian, who at the time had been ravenous for any and every activity that might stimulate either in ways his homework and schoolyard athletics were incapable of doing, had taken to the sport with a passion. Despite his mother's protests and his father's prohibitions, he had scurried up into the canopy whenever he had the chance.

That was what this manoeuvre reminded him of: Julian gripped the Jem'Hadar's arm as if it were a branch, and tensed the lean muscles of his biceps, his forearms, his shoulders. The left one was less responsive than the right, but he still felt himself rising, and the pressure on his jaw let up a little. But the Second was tightening his grip instead, and Julian heard an ominous creak of cartilage. When next he tried to draw a breath, he got only a thin tendril of air that burned in his constricted throat and did nothing to relieve the ghastly pressure in his lungs.

In another moment he would pass out; he was certain of that. But he couldn't seem to muster himself to fight back: it was all he could do to maintain the grip that was preventing his jaw from detaching from his skull. Julian tried to kick at the Jem'Hadar, but his right foot just swung leadenly at the end of his leg.

Then suddenly they were turning, the Second rotating clockwise in a motion that made Julian's head spin violently. When the grip on his neck released, he wasn't quite able to process what had happened. His head snapped back and he fell, hanging briefly from arms that still clung to his opponent's wrist. When he was flung off, Julian crashed to his knees, only to be clouted across the side of his face with a swinging fist. He jolted to the right, and was promptly driven back to the left by its partner, clubbing the other side of his skull.

He scuttled away on hand and knees, his left arm once more forgetting how to obey him. He was groping along the floor, trying to find the nearest post despite the bursting flares of blackness obscuring his sight, when a hand closed on his hair, yanking his head backward and his body upright so that the Jem'Hadar could buffet him under the chin with the heel of his hand.

Julian reached out even as he reeled backward, and his fingers closed on the Jem'Hadar's forearm. He felt the loose hide that rippled over the hard muscle, and his fingers closed upon a flap. He twisted as hard as he could, as if reefing on a fistful of a fitted bedsheet. The flesh rippled into a tight swirl beneath his fingers. It wasn't nearly as effective as grabbing Talak'ran's gill had been, but it was painful enough to elicit a hiss of anger from the Second. A moment later, Julian was crashing to earth again as the Jem'Hadar's free arm swung around for another blow.

He landed on his left shoulder, and the jolt of anguish that shot through that side of his back almost robbed him of the will to stay conscious. Booted feet were thundering next to him, crowding him, threatening to kick. Julian's long limbs were trying to curl inward, his body shrinking into a defensive ball. He couldn't remember who he was or why he was here, or why there was so much pain. He wanted it to stop. Why didn't someone make it stop?  _Please, please, Mum, make it stop!_

But he knew he had to get up again, somehow, and so he got his knees under him and huddled there while he drew an agonized breath, his right arm curled protectively around his hanging head. The wave of blackest vertigo that seized him as he pushed himself up onto his left foot was almost enough to carry him away into merciful oblivion, but it didn't and his right hand was already groping for the pylon. This time, the gong seemed to rattle his brain, and Julian squinted through the noxious fog to track the dark hulk of the Jem'Hadar Second as he surged forward again.

Julian caught him under the arm, pressing his body against the oncoming one as much for support as to undercut the Second's line of attack. For a moment they were motionless, meeting one another with equal but opposing force. Then a sweeping foot knocked Julian's feet out from under him and he fell again. This time, something gave way in his right knee with a soft  _pop_ that he could feel right up into his hip. His lips parted to scream, but only a hiss of tormented air escaped. He crumpled forward again, and that was when the Second kicked him in the face.

He didn't feel the impact; not exactly. He saw the boot coming for him, eclipsing his sight. And he heard the sickening  _crack_  reverberate through his skull. He thought he heard it with his external ears, too, but he couldn't be sure of that. All he really understood was that his head had exploded, a blazing pulsar of pain. He felt himself falling, flying backward with the force of the impact. The back of his head smashed into something hard and approximately cylindrical: he felt his scalp tear open on one rigid edge. His skull bounced, rolling off to the left, and it settled between two of the hard nubs. Julian knew, distantly, that his legs were bent unnaturally beneath him, in a way that was sending little tremors of strain into the ligaments of his knees and his hips, but he couldn't do anything about that now.

"Doctor!" a thunderous voice hissed, very near at hand. "It is over. Stay down."

Julian's lips parted to protest that it wasn't over, that he had to keep fighting — but he couldn't remember why. And then something appeared above him, pale and greenish in the unnatural light. It swam, an indistinct blur before dazed, watering eyes, before finally taking on a familiar form. Two keen eyes. Thin, strained lips. A chevron of bony protuberances above dark, oblique brows.

 _Her name is Kalenna_ , Julian thought vacantly, pleased that he could remember that much.  _She used to be a Major with the Tal Shiar. We all used to be something other than this, once upon a time…_

He didn't feel the toe of the Second's boot as it blasted into his ribs one final time. He was already slipping away.

 _(fade_ )

Julian felt his way around the edge of the pain, a blind man in a lightless room on the dark side of a forgotten world. He would draw too close, and he would feel the fire, and he would shrink away like a whipped puppy, bewildered and afraid. Yet he came back again and again, trying different approaches, groping at the black doors that led back to consciousness. He was a seeker, an explorer: he had left Earth and its tumultuous interpersonal tangles behind to find adventure in the stars, to seek out not only answers, but questions yet unimagined. And it seemed he could not stop exploring, even if the only galaxy left to him was his own mysterious and miserable body.

There was something wrong with it. Several somethings, in fact. It posed an interesting diagnostic puzzle. How to determine what was wrong with this patient, when every time the Doctor drew too near, he too was overtaken with pain? It was difficult to remain calm and clinically detached when you could feel your patient's agony. It shouldn't be allowed.

None of this should be allowed.

Julian decided to be methodical about this. Airway, breathing, and circulation: the first criteria for a casualty assessment. Any first-year medical student knew that. Airway… impossible to assess without movement, but he was almost certain he was breathing. No, no, he  _was_ certain, because he could feel the sawing pain in his chest every time he dragged in another shallow draught of air. He could feel it burning in his throat, too, but the flow was steady, both in and out, and there was no crackling or whistling or bubbling that might indicate a rupture of the larynx. Fine. Airway, operational. Breathing, laboured but steady. Circulation…

If he was breathing, he had a pulse. That, too, was first-year medical student logic. Whether the blood was getting where it needed to go was another question. Open wounds, impinged blood vessels, cyanosis… none of these things could be evaluated unless he opened his eyes, which he simply was not yet prepare to attempt. So he thought about his body instead. A proper assessment should proceed from head to toe, but he wasn't willing to think too hard about his head yet, either. So he started with his toes.

He could feel them. They felt engorged with the cold, but when he wiggled them, they obeyed him. He could feel the perfectly-fitted caverns of his standard-issue boots. Why weren't standard-issue boots warmer? Yes, they were primarily meant for wear on-board ship and in other controlled environments, but they were worn on away missions as a matter of routine, and some places a Starfleet officer might be called upon to visit were less than temperate. Julian's feet were cold, ergo his boots should be warmer. It seemed as simple as that. He was annoyed that the designers of the uniform hadn't anticipated his predicament.

He flexed his left ankle first, and then the right. They, too, obeyed him, but he felt a dull pain in his right shin when he moved. It made him reluctant to try to shift that knee, but when he bent the left one, ever so slightly, it obeyed him. He was too tired to try to move his hips, so Julian focused on his hands instead.

He had been working on the left side, and so he tried to move his left fingers. They didn't obey him. He tried again, focusing all of his will on the lean, delicate muscles that controlled his phalanges. Nothing. Panic gripped him, overwhelming the calm and clinical voice. He remembered the numbness, the loss of function, and the inexplicable pain. What had happened to his arm? He needed his arm. He was a doctor, a surgeon, and he needed his two skilled, steady hands!

He moved the right one frantically, rippling his fingers and flexing his wrist and bending his elbow. His knuckles stung and he could feel the tremors, but at least it was moving when he told it to move. Then suddenly, it  _wasn't_  moving anymore, because thin, cold fingers were closing around it, grasping it and trapping it and preventing him from moving it.

"Doctor?" The voice was near at hand, but muffled by the ringing in his ears.  _Tinnitus, common after a blow to the head_. And he'd had more than one blow to the head, hadn't he? "Doctor Bashir. Lie still. Try not to move. You'll hurt yourself."

He had to open his eyes now. He knew that voice, but it wasn't one of his nurses. If he'd been injured in the line of duty, it should be Nurse Jabara at his side now, tending him. She was the next most senior member of the Infirmary staff. Or Nurse Barrett, if he was on the  _Defiant_ instead of the station. Until three years ago, Julian hadn't had any Starfleet officers in his department. He'd preferred to reserve the postings for representatives of the Bajoran medical community. It had seemed more equitable, more respectful. When Starfleet Command had sent the warship, they had sent personnel to staff it.

Julian forced his eyes open, blinded briefly by light that quickly resolved into dreary gloom. His left eye blinked wide, but the right one only opened to a slit. He could see the blurry ridge of inflamed tissue. The right side of his face felt enormous, hot and swollen and curiously numb. He had to turn his head in that direction in order to find the face hovering beyond his shoulder. This time, the recognition came more quickly but without any shred of satisfaction. Julian's heart sank as he remembered everything, and understood why Nurse Jabara wasn't here.

Major Kalenna was gripping his hand, studying his face worriedly. He was lying flat on his back on the unyielding cot in the back left-hand corner of Barracks 6 in Dominion Internment Camp 371.

 _(fade_ )

Recollection grew grey for a while after that, and Julian floated in a haze of pain and shock. He was shivering under the two thin blankets tucked around him, and eventually Parvok came over with a third. The Romulan Sub-Lieutenant was reluctant to look at him, and he scurried away as quickly as he could. Julian had a thousand questions, but he couldn't seem to figure out how to master the gift of speech. Sometimes Kalenna was at his side, and sometimes she went away. He came back from a dalliance in the Demilitarized Zone between waking and unconsciousness to a sharp stinging sensation as she dabbed at his lip with something spongy and damp. It stung: apparently he had a contusion of the mouth. When she lifted her hand to attend to his eyebrow, Julian recognized one of his sterile pads. He felt anger and indignation and frustration in equal measure. There had only been eight left in the case, and his patients needed them! She had no right to waste one!

"Your scalp was bleeding," Kalenna said softly. "You hit the lights on the lip of the ring after the Second kicked you. I don't think the skull is fractured, but I don't know how to be certain."

There was no way to be certain,  _per se_ , without imaging studies: a depressed skull fracture was easy enough to appreciate on palpation, and sometimes even visible to the naked eye, but a hairline crack was much harder to detect. Julian didn't vocalize any of this, of course. He still wasn't sure if he could talk. Snatches of his last fight were coming back to him, and he remembered how the Second had seized him by the throat. He tried to work his jaw gingerly, concerned about the state of his temporomandibular joint, but the deep and horrible pain that shot through the right side of his face at the attempt made him think better of that effort. He lifted his right hand instead, finding his ear and exploring with cautious fingers.

The joint seemed to be intact, but there was appreciable swelling on the crest of his cheekbone.

"Don't," Kalenna said softly, but she did not try to stop him as he prodded the hollow of his cheek, once again skirting the borders of the pain — this time physically, instead of in his mind. There was a hard mass of inflamed tissue across the bridge of his cheekbone, and when Julian tried to palpate it, white-hot agony blazed into his sinuses and his eye socket and his teeth. A quick, anxious pass of his tongue while he rode out the wave of pain reassured him that the teeth, at least, were all intact and where they were supposed to be. But the pain in his face…

He probed his eye socket next, digging deep into the edematous mass despite the deep, pernicious anguish. Pain was transient, and he had to know. But the socket was still smooth and unyielding, and as he grew more accustomed to the pain it seemed to narrow in its focus. He remembered the black mass of the Jem'Hadar's boot coming for him, and he remembered the sound of the impact — not the  _thunk_  of a reinforced toe against a human face, but the deafening  _crack_  that had ripped through his skull. Julian thought he understood, and he stopped his palpation before he actually put pressure on the source of the pain.

He had a non-displaced fracture, hopefully hairline, of the inferior aspect of his zygomatic arch.

After that, Julian had to rest for a while. Kalenna was speaking to him, and there was a dark shadow just at the edge of his periphery that was surely General Martok. But it was too hard to listen, and speech was impossible. Julian simply let himself drift, shivering and hurting and trying to lie still. His forehead felt very light, as if his frontal lobes were inflated with helium gas and might float away if not for the tether of his neck. He didn't want to think about the state of his dura. He tried to remember how many blows to the head he had taken, but he couldn't.

Something else was niggling at him, but Julian couldn't think what it might be. He was too absorbed in trying to puzzle out how severe the damage was to the rest of his body, all while trying to move as little as possible. He was nauseous and miserably thirsty, but he was afraid to ask for water. Moving his jaw at all seemed very unwise, even though the right side of his face was mercifully numb again. But there was something, something else that he needed to know. Something even more important than the mystery of his deadened left arm. And it was hovering just out of reach in the mists of concussion and pain.

 _Pain. Brain. What was there to gain_? a singsong voice asked, mocking him. Julian was visited by a vague memory of a child chanting a rhyme, her voice high and light and slightly off-key. And she was playing a game. Hopscotch. Jules didn't understand hopscotch, but all the other children played it. The shapes in the squares meant something to them. They were nonsense shapes to him, like the Dominionese letters on the Vorta's medkit. Only it wasn't hopscotch, not exactly, and the words to the song were different, too. He tried to remember, but he couldn't. All he could hear was this other string of rhymes, the new one. The wrong one.

_Pain. Brain. Gain. Tain._

_Tain_.

"Tain!" Julian croaked, remembering. He reached for Kalenna's quilted sleeve, groping with long fingers. His knuckles were torn. He remembered getting in a few blows of his own, though not against the Second. That didn't matter now. Nothing mattered anymore, unless he had managed to last long enough in the ring. "Tain…" he repeated, hoping she would understand.

Kalenna nodded tightly. "Yes," she said, grim fervour in her voice. "He did it. The transmitter is wired into the power grid now. There's no sign that the Vorta knows anything. You kept him out there long enough, Doctor. Everything…" She faltered, casting her eyes down at his shoulder for a moment before she could make herself go on. "Everything went exactly according to plan."

And Martok was there, no longer a shadow in the hazy distance, but a looming guardian high above Julian's head. His battered face was set in lines of hard pride and joyless satisfaction. His lone eye gleamed even in the gloom. "You are victorious, Doctor," he declared fiercely. "You were defeated in the field, but your sacrifice has won us this battle. All is well."

Julian wanted to nod, but the preliminary tensing of his neck awoke a wave of uncontrollable vertigo and his vision began to go dark. Thickly, speaking against a ravaged throat and a fractured face, he mumbled; "That's all right, then."

Afterwards, for a long time, there was only darkness.

 _(fade to black_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**mandible:** the lower jawbone.

 **temporomandibular joint:** the joint where the jaw is affixed to the skull. There is one on each side of the head, in front of the ears.

 **inferior aspect** : the lower edge.

 **zygomatic arch:** the facial bone of the cheek which forms the bottom of the eye socket and supports the nose.

 **dura:** the sleeve of connective tissue surrounding the brain.

 


	29. Teaser: A Lunch Date

_Note: Apologies for the tailoring jargon/detail in this chapter. I'm an accomplished maker and an amateur clothing historian. And say what you will about that shirt, it fit Alexander Siddig like a glove. A purple velour glove._

**Part VI, Teaser: A Lunch Date**

With his last fitting of the morning completed in record time, Elim Garak found himself in the unusual and enviable position of being able to shut up early for lunch. There was no point starting in on the alterations to Lieutenant Vilix'pran's new uniforms before eating: Garak was looking at a solid eight hours of delicate adjustments, and it would only frustrate him to have to lay the work aside after three-quarters of an hour. Nor did he have any intention of cancelling his lunch date just to dive into the project, however challenging it was. Lunch with Doctor Julian Bashir was the highlight of his week.

So Garak tidied his worktable and smoothed the three piles of neatly folded garments; four jackets, four vests, and four mustard-coloured shirts. Starfleet's decision to overhaul the sartorial image of its entire population was a frivolous one, a massive expenditure of labour and resources that only the prosperous (one might even say prodigal) Federation could afford. But it certainly was good for business. Uniforms were not supposed to be replicatable, and resequencing patterns were not provided for them — a sensible precaution, considering the trouble unsavoury types could get up to if it proved too easy to impersonate a Starfleet officer. The garments were instead manufactured to order, which explained the exceptional quality of the foundational workmanship. However, this also meant that they were constructed remotely to an officer's measurements, and not fitted on the body until the person in question received their requisition. This meant there were sometimes tailoring issues that needed correction. Nothing looked more unbecoming than a sloppily fitted Starfleet uniform, and so Garak did a modest but steady business in alterations.

Ordinarily modest but steady, anyhow. In their hurry to roll out the new design across the fleet, the Quartermaster's Department had cut corners in updating their officers' measurements, and in double-checking the specs at the point of manufacture. In the ordinary way of things, Garak could expect two or three Starfleet orders a month — perhaps more if there had been some major skirmish, or if the  _Defiant's_  crew had wormed their way into a messy situation. In the ten days since the new uniforms had been distributed to the personnel on Deep Space Nine, he had done forty-seven, including an armscye adjustment for Captain Sisko himself.

And really, if Starfleet couldn't even manage to kit out their command-level officers in decent weeds, did they have any business redesigning their uniforms at all?

It was good for business, at least: he invoiced Sisko directly for each crewmember, and Starfleet always paid their bills. That most of the changes had been relatively minor was all the more irritating, however. Lieutenant Commander Dax's trouser length, for example: she was taller than the average woman from a Federation world, but not egregiously so. Was it  _really_  so hard to leave a couple extra inches in the cuff? But Lieutenant Vilix'pran provided a unique fitting challenge, so Garak could excuse the confusion in his case. Not every tailor in the Quadrant, after all, enjoyed the Cardassian eye for detail or Garak's unique motivation to see the job well done.

Because of the wings, Vilix'pran's uniforms had been made with elliptical cutouts over each shoulder-blade, with two side-back fastenings on either side of a placket that was supposed to lie comfortably over his spine. The difficulty was that someone had cut the placket too narrow on every single layer of his uniform. The result was that the edge of the main body of the shirts pulled against the outer side of each wing-root. The Lieutenant had tried gamely to make do, but after a week and a half he was beginning to chafe. Garak would have scolded him for not coming in sooner, but after all, a working father of twelve couldn't simply run off to the tailor's on a whim.

Garak dimmed the shop lights and stepped out onto the Promenade, locking the door behind him. He would meander down to the Replimat and secure a good table. Then he could nurse a beverage and observe the denizens of the space station while he waited for his dining companion. Humans spoke of "people watching" like it was some idle diversion, but to Garak it was so much more. There were volumes to be learned from the everyday movements, the body language, and the facial expressions of the people around him, and what had once been a matter of professional interest was now one of his primary tools for survival.

Take Major Kira, for instance. She was sitting at one of the central tables in the Replimat with her back to the general traffic of the Promenade. Garak would not have expected her to choose such an incautious position: a table in a corner, with her back to the wall was more Kira's style. And then there was the way she was sitting. She always curled possessively over her food; it was a subconscious habit of those who had grown up half-starved, competing for scraps with those around them. But today her left fist was tucked up to brace the side of her head, and the forward-leaning posture could not be comfortable with her pregnancy as far advanced as it was. She was picking indifferently at her food, too, clearly not relishing it but forcing herself to eat regardless.

As Garak studied her, reading the weight of tension in her back under the smoothly fitted maternity tunic he had made, Chief O'Brien approached. He seemed to be looking for her, and sure enough, he made straight for her table and sat down in the vacant chair. His broad, honest ( _perhaps too honest_ , Garak always thought) face was the picture of sober concern as he spoke to her. At this distance, Garak could not hear what they were saying, but he did not draw nearer. He always preferred to be circumspect where Major Kira was concerned. Her sweeping contempt for his species had softened over the years as she learned to see Cardassians as individuals worthy of a wide range of treatment, from respect and consideration to the hot, caustic loathing she reserved for Skrain Dukat. But Garak did not rank very highly on her hierarchy of regard, and after last year's  _unfortunate incident_  onboard the  _Defiant_ , he had been careful to keep his distance.

They were deep in conversation now, the engineer and the executive officer. Garak wondered what they had to talk about that could not be said in the privacy of the O'Brien family quarters where Major Kira now resided. It was a curious living arrangement, stretching even the Cardassian idea of familial bonds, but it seemed to be working well for all parties involved. In Chief O'Brien's place, with his own child in an alien womb, Garak supposed he might feel a similar need to keep everyone safe behind one door. But that was laughable, wasn't it?  _His child_ , as though Garak could ever aspire to something so… serenely domestic.

Something the Chief had said, the fervour in his expression almost more eloquent than any words, made Kira hang her head. She bobbed an uneasy nod and took another spoonful of her meal. Just then, the chirp of the comm system cut through the air. Garak had been unable to hear the conversing pair, but he could just make out Odo's steady but cautious voice.

"Ops to Major Kira."

Kira spoke in reply, and then she stiffened and O'Brien paled as the security chief's voice went on to explain; "There's another incoming message for you, Major, and they refuse to give either their name or location."

Kira sprang from her seat and strode off, Chief O'Brien hastening after her. Garak tracked them with his eyes all the way to the turbolift. As the door slid shut, he heard the Major snap, "Ops!"

 _Well, well. That was interesting_. He would have to do a little digging later on, to see if he could find out what was going on in Ops. Garak liked to keep abreast of the activities of the senior staff, although he had to admit that Starfleet was not nearly as easy to spy on as he'd first expected when they took over this station. Much of what they did, they simply did in the bald light of day, with no attempt at subterfuge or misdirection. They labelled this "transparency" and coloured it a virtue. But when they did decide to do something in secret, it could be difficult to suss out the truth through routine means. Garak had been obliged to update his repertoire of clever tricks over the years to adapt to the new regime, and he flattered himself that he had done himself and his training proud.  _Done Tain proud? No, not that._ Never that, however he tried _._

Thoughts of the man who had styled himself Garak's mentor and superior were painful, best avoided. That one had crept up on him. Enabran Tain was dead, his power at an end. If that meant Garak could no longer strive for the impossible approbation he craved, well, that was a kind of freedom in itself — wasn't it?

And in the meantime, there was a very tempting table sitting vacant in the busy Replimat: no one was eager to snap it up while the Major's abandoned meal still sat half-eaten. Garak had no such scruples. He didn't think she'd be back any time soon. He strolled across the breadth of the Promenade and slid into the seat lately vacated by Chief O'Brien.

The other scenes playing out around him were not nearly as captivating as the first had been. Two Starfleet officers in gold collars were poring over a couple of PADDs by the bubbling light fixture columns. At another table, a human woman was deep in conversation with members of two different hairless species Garak couldn't be bothered to identify. In the corner, a pair of males, one human and one Andorian, appeared to be having a lover's tiff. Garak wondered if the blue one had just explained to the brown one about the rigidly traditional four-spouse marriage his people clung to. Interspecies romance was complicated, and while humans loved to put on a great show of acceptance of all models of love and family, Garak had observed they also had very firm ideas about the sort of relationships they wanted for themselves. The range across the species was broad, but individuals often adhered to a narrow choice.

He didn't suppose a Cardassian was in any position to pass judgement on  _that_.

When he had been at the table long enough to establish his occupancy, Garak rose and returned Major Kira's tray, now smelling strongly of cold, mashed katterpod beans, to the replicator. He checked the time on the control interface. Too early yet to order the Doctor's tea: it would be cold by the time he turned up. Garak requested a glass of rokassa juice for himself, and slid back into his chair just in time to thwart the ambitions of a pair of monks from the Bajoran shrine. He smiled graciously at them, but they did not return the gesture. He supposed that was only to be expected: even if he weren't a Cardassian, he had taken the table they wanted. He watched them move off, faintly amused, and then settled comfortable to toy with his drink.

It was 1300 hours on the dot when his lunch companion arrived. Julian Subatoi Bashir, tall and svelte despite the execrable new uniform, strolled up the Promenade and mounted the dais of the Replimat. Though now that Garak was looking, he noticed how the jacket's grey, quilted yoke actually made the Doctor seem a little broader in the shoulders, and he couldn't deny that the rich cyan of the shirt made a pleasing contrast against the auriferous skin. Humans had such a vast rangeof skintones, from Chief O'Brien's pale, ruddy complexion to shades far darker than Captain Sisko's. Child as he was of a world of monochromatic faces, Garak was fascinated by the variety. It had interesting implications for his daily trade, too: a colour that looked splendid on one human made the next one look like a bilious Romulan.

The Doctor had sought him out with his eyes, and he now approached, grinning affably. "Good afternoon, Garak!" he said, swinging one slim leg over the chair Major Kira had abandoned with such haste. "How goes the war?"

"War?" Garak huffed, annoyed. It was another one of those absurd human idioms, surely. Nonsensical, meaningless — and a little tasteless, considering the situation with the Klingons. "My dear Doctor, I prefer my daily affairs free from bloodshed."

As he had hoped, Bashir's eyes crinkled with mirth. "I'll bet you do," he said with wry relish. Then his face grew somewhat graver as he added; "I was sorry to cancel last week. I had a lot of work to do, catching up after my conference. Settling in, you might say."

"Oh, that's  _quite_  all right," Garak assured him airily. In fact, he'd been very displeased when the Doctor had requested a pass. They had missed not one, but two weeks before that, thanks to his trip to Meezan IV. Three weeks without the diversion of lunch with a man Garak could not deny was his friend had made for a dreary month. "I've been quite busy myself. It seems that every other Starfleet officer on the station has complaints about the fit of their new uniforms. I've been taking in and letting out, hemming and tucking and re-cutting all week. I'm sick of the sight of those things."

"Sorry to hear that," Bashir chuckled. He reached beneath the table to tug at the hem of his jacket. "Mine fits like a glove, as you can see."

"A pity," said Garak. " _Your_ face, at least, would have been a welcome sight in my shop. Commander Worf isn't a very amiable customer."

" _Worf_  came in to have his uniform altered? He doesn't seem the type," said Bashir. He craned his slender neck to peer into Garak's cup. "What are you drinking today?"

"Rokassa juice," Garak said, then tilted his head quizzically. "Can't you smell it? You've developed such a discerning nose for Cardassian foods over the years, I would have thought…"

"I suppose I'm a little stuffed up today," said Bashir lightly. "So, are you going to tell me what was so far off-spec with Worf's new uniforms that he came to you for assistance? Or do tailors hold themselves to a standard of confidentiality, just like doctors?"

"I do try to be… circumspect," Garak demurred playfully. "Without getting into the particulars, I think the Commander's chief objection was that he wasn't able to enjoy the full range of motion he requires in the discharge of his duties." Smiling coyly, he manoeuvred the conversation back to more interesting waters. "Are you  _certain_  you don't want any adjustments to your uniforms, Doctor? You're usually so particular. I've spent dozens of hours over the last few years tweaking your garments to meet your exacting standards. Why, I even altered that abominable purple velour number, even though I could have made you some sort of decent beachwear in half the time."

"Now, Garak, I happen to be very fond of that shirt," Bashir warned, wagging a finger. "I think it suits my personality."

"And what personality might that be, Doctor?" Garak asked, mockingly innocent. "The personality of an Orion pirate, perhaps?"

Bashir pursed his lips, teasing. But for some reason, there was no sparkle in his eyes as he said; "You never know!" The he clapped his hands to his thighs and raised his eyebrows as he got smoothly to his feet. "But my uniforms fit perfectly, Garak: no alterations required. Sorry to disappoint."

The hell of it was, Garak  _was_  disappointed, just a little. It was fortunate that he rarely had to seek out Doctor Bashir in his professional capacity, but he enjoyed when the young human sought him out in his. It made for a welcome interlude in a day that might be filled with nothing more stimulating than cutting fifty perfect buttonholes and stroking the egos of insecure customers. And it meant they got to spend time together outside of their usual meals. But if the uniform fit, it fit, and there was nothing more to be said on the matter.

"What can I get you?" Bashir asked. He had come around the table and was now standing at Garak's shoulder.

"So you're playing the waiter today?" Garak asked. "I wasn't aware you had serving experience."

"Oh, I'm a man of many talents," said Bashir sagely. "Just tell me what you want to eat, and you can sit there and defend our table until I get back."

There was a certain logic to this: the Replimat was considerably busier now than it had been when Garak first arrived, and competition for the seats was stiff. A harried-looking Bajoran woman juggled two loaded trays while her eldest child, a lanky girl of thirteen or fourteen, carried another and herded three smaller siblings in their mother's wake. Garak, who wouldn't have given up his seat for the Grand Nagus himself, was mildly surprised his gallant companion didn't make the offer. Then again, they had a small table and only two chairs: their spot wouldn't have done the young family much good.

Garak gave his order, and waited impatiently for Bashir's return. They settled over their meals and into a lively cross-cultural debate (music, this time, Cardassia's loyalist masters against Earth's twenty-third century chimes movement) that could have carried them clear through to dessert if Garak hadn't noticed something peculiar.

"Is there something wrong with your linguini, Doctor?" he asked curiously, instead of rising to the bait of the other man's absurd point about self-expression superseding patriotic intent.

Bashir's face scrunched in puzzlement. "What? No, not at all. Why do you ask?"

"You're eating so slowly," Garak observed.

The Doctor looked down at his plate, and then across at Garak's. "We've both got exactly the same proportion of our meals left," he said, clearly perplexed. He was wearing an expression that reminded Garak of a schoolboy whose math problem had unaccountably come out wrong

"Precisely!" said Garak. "Ordinarily, you scarf down your meal like you're afraid someone might snatch it away. You  _never_  pause to savour your food as it ought to be savoured. We've talked about it before, you know. So I can only conclude that either something is amiss with the dish itself, or something's dampened your appetite."

"No, of course not," Bashir said, trying to brush him off. Then he seemed to think better of it. He laid aside his fork and chafed his palms together. "I suppose it's Major Kira," he confessed.

Now,  _this_  was interesting. Garak leaned in a little, invitingly. Humans loved to confide in others, and Doctor Bashir certainly loved to confide in  _him_.

"Oh, dear," he said, as sincerely as he was able. "Not trouble with the baby, I hope?"

"No…" Bashir muttered. Then his eyes grew keen and alert and he shot Garak one of his delightfully perturbed looks. "You know I can't discuss it."

"Because it concerns the security of the station, or because of your oath as a physician?" asked Garak.

Bashir tilted his head to the left. "Both," he allowed. Then he sighed and shook his head in obvious annoyance. "She's a contrary person. She says she's invested in doing what's best for the fetus, but she won't follow instructions. It was my understanding that…  _Bajoran women_ put a premium on caring for their young. And yet yesterday—"

Garak held up a warning palm. "Perhaps you shouldn't say any more, Doctor," he sang. If it had nothing to do with the cryptic call from Ops that had driven Kira so swiftly from her meal, he really wasn't interested. "While I appreciate the trust you place in me, I don't really think the Major would appreciate you sharing this level of detail about her pregnancy."

Bashir looked chagrined. "No, no, of course she wouldn't," he said. Garak expected him to pick up his fork again, so that he had something to fidget with. Instead, he folded his hands over his plate and shook his head. "It's just frustrating, that's all. When the patients don't listen to their own best interests. It's irrational."

Garak supposed that was true, but surely that wasn't a surprise to an experienced physician. There was clearly something deeper troubling his dining companion. For one thing, he had referred to the O'Brien offspring as  _the fetus_ , when Garak didn't think he'd ever said anything other than  _the baby_  before. He was no expert in obstetrics (and was anyone  _really_  an expert on this unique pregnancy, except perhaps the man sitting across from him?), but Garak knew enough about clinical detachment to suspect there was some reason Bashir was trying to distance himself emotionally from the child in question. Maybe there really was something wrong with the pregnancy; from the sound of things, something that Major Kira wasn't willing to cooperate in addressing. Only that didn't seem quite like  _her_ , either.

The other odd thing was the way he had said  _Bajoran women_  like that, so deliberately after the briefest of pauses, as if a different word had been on his mind. Something a little less polite, perhaps? Even  _rude_? Garak felt a little gleeful jolt of amusement.  _Why, Doctor, even after all these years, you continue to surprise me_.

"I'm sure she'll come around," he soothed. "The Major takes her responsibilities very seriously. Even the… unorthodox ones."

"I'm sure you're right," Bashir sighed. He shook his head and looked around the tabletop, as if he had only just remembered they were eating. He lifted his mug of Tarkalean tea and sipped it with a curious deliberateness. "Now, then. Music," he said, like a propagandist returning to the approved script after a nonconformist newsroom interruption. "As I was saying, the importance of personal expression is—"

The comm system chimed. "Sisko to Bashir!" The Captain's voice was brisk and very hard.

"Bashir here. Go ahead, sir," the Doctor said crisply.

"Report to the security office immediately," the Captain instructed. "There's been an incident onboard the  _Volga_ , and we need your expertise."

Bashir stiffened, his face slackening with anxiety just a fraction too slowly. He really was distracted today. Garak put the pieces together swiftly enough. "The  _Volga_?" he said. "Isn't that the runabout that Commander Worf and Commander Dax took to Starbase 63?"

Bashir's lips scarcely moved. "Yes," he said tightly. Of course his first thought was to fear for his friends. It was most endearing.

"Dax and Worf are unharmed, Doctor," Sisko's voice promised. "They're on their way back from Bajor, and they'll be docking in just under three hours. Come to the security office, and Odo will fill you in."

Bashir nodded briskly, even though he had to know the Captain couldn't see him. "Aye, sir," he said. "On my way. Bashir out."

As the comm link went dead, the young man was already climbing to his feet, snatching the napkin off of his lap and tossing it down on the table as he went.

"Bajor?" Garak mused. "Did they make some kind of detour?"

"I'm going to find out, aren't I?" asked Bashir, but his tone seemed like a counterfeit of strained irritability instead of the real thing. A pity, really. Garak loved watching his friend in a pique. When the Doctor raked up a thin smile, the Cardassian blinked pleasantly up at him. "My apologies, Garak: we'll have to finish our debate another time."

"But of course, Doctor," Garak said, all pleasant understanding and willing absolution. "Run along. Do your duty."

Bashir nodded once more and then strode off. He moved purposefully, but he did not run.  _Well, it's not as if he has far to go_ , Garak explained to himself.  _And if they won't be docking for three hours, there's probably not much he can do when he gets there, anyway._

He looked down at the abandoned tray: coiled noodles strewn with pink curlicues of Bajoran shrimp and a generous dusting of melted cheese. When she paused to think a moment, Major Kira would probably feel a pang of guilt for the unfinished meal she had left behind. Garak doubted any similar misgivings would visit the good Doctor. Julian Bashir had probably never gone hungry in his life: he would have no compunctions about wasting food.

Garak had grown up in a time of famine, and he  _did_  worry about things like that. But those days were the stuff of bad dreams, and he wasn't quite guilty enough to finish the Doctor's meal for him. The shrimp looked delectable, but the human predilection for consuming dishes made from the milk of lesser species was, quite frankly, revolting. Garak plucked up the abandoned napkin and tented it over the offending dish, before resuming his own lunch contentedly.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	30. Physician, Heal Thyself

_Note: N_ _itpick on "Voyager"! Couldn't resist._

**Part VI, Act I: Physician, Heal Thyself**

It was hunger that woke Julian. His whole body was a tangle of strained muscles and bruised tissues. His head throbbed with the rhythm of his heart, and his sides ached poisonously with every breath, and his right eye felt like it would burst. There was a stake of anguish driven deep into his left breast, penetrating his ribs and impaling heart and lung and pinning him to the thin mattress beneath. And yet it was his stomach that woke him, churning demandingly and begging to be fed.

It made sense in an absurd sort of way. Julian had been operating at a caloric deficit since awaking on this asteroid — probably since being snatched from his lodgings on Meezan IV. In his first two fights, he had expended massive amounts of energy trying to evade his opponents. Today's wretched little meal would have been stripped down to its molecular components with ruthless efficiency by a metabolism that, although hopefully starting to slow a little as it adapted to starvation mode, was the envy of many a man. But the gnawing of his empty belly was a good sign: the dying didn't feel hunger, and it might even mean he had escaped any serious organ damage.

The pain, though, was much worse than he remembered. He had used up his allotment of trauma endorphins, it seemed, and he could feel every disparate misery in his body. He forced himself to focus on the ones he hadn't been able to assess before. Of these, the anguish in Julian's chest was the most worrisome, but the fact that it was this intense while he lay unmoving on his back, his leaden left arm tucked at his side without strain, told him something very important. He didn't want to believe it, because it was just so improbable — and yet, as prognoses went, this one was likelier than most to spare his precious left hand.

Julian worked his right hand free of the weight of the blankets. There were four now, where before there had been three. His cellmates were doing what they could to keep him warm, and he probably owed to their ministrations the fact that he hadn't succumbed utterly to shock. The zygomatic fracture alone might have been strain enough upon a human body to put him in very real danger, and Julian knew he never should have allowed himself to give in to unconsciousness as he had. But he couldn't think of anything he could have done to stop it.

He groped for the rail at the side of the cot. He had to sit up, as much to take the pressure off of his back as to begin a proper assessment. But his arm was quaking and his grip was unsure, and he couldn't even pull himself up far enough to get his head off the flattened pillow. When he tried to tense his abdomen so that he could roll onto his right side, he felt a hot dagger shoot into his left kidney, and another through his ribs. He sagged back down, panting shallowly for air.

"He's awake," a hoarse, husky voice rasped. Parvok. There was rapid, mustering motion, and suddenly Kalenna was at Julian's side.

"Lie still, Doctor," she shushed, her attempt at a soothing voice undercut somewhat by the wild anxiety in her eyes.

Julian tried to shake his head. It was a mistake. The room whirled about him and he had to struggle to cling to consciousness. He would have to speak instead, although the idea of moving any of the muscles in his ravaged face was horrifying. He tried to shift his jaw as little as possible, shaping the words with the left side of his mouth.

"Can't…" he mumbled thickly. The right side side of his face throbbed horrifically, and he felt like his upper incisors and canines on that side were about to shatter with the pain, but he pressed on. "I need… help me?"

"Help you. Help you with what?" Kalenna asked. She sounded frazzled and exhausted, practically tripping over herself to oblige him. Julian felt a stab of irrational guilt. He hadn't meant to worry her so. "I-if you need water—"

He wished she hadn't said that. Suddenly, his whole body was burning with unquenchable thirst. But he couldn't focus on that need now. "Help me sit," he croaked.

Kalenna shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "No, you need to rest. It's better if you don't move. We'll have trouble enough with that in the morning. If you need to…" She paused, trying to remember how he had phrased it before. He knew what she was trying to say, and he wanted to assure her that wasn't a problem. He hadn't had enough water today to need to urinate.

 _And that's going to be a problem, if you've bruised that kidney_ , his inner physician warned grimly. Where was that soothing bedside manner when it came to this particular patient? But Julian didn't have time for the reprimand. There was work to be done.

"I have to sit," he said, forcing himself to form every word, and not just the ones he needed in order to make himself understood. He hoped that by using complete sentences he could convince her of his fitness for the task at hand. "My back is… my weight on my back is painful."

Kalenna's eyes grew wide and apologetic. It distressed him to see her like this. He had grown so used to her unflappable, professional demeanour, as if every day in this hell were just another on assignment with the Tal Shiar. She looked up and down the length of him, and then gathered back the blankets. Suddenly bereft of their comforting weight, Julian's whole front was taken with the chill of the air. He tensed against the urge to shiver, and regretted it almost at once; even that simple contracture of his muscles hurt.

He tightened his awkward hold on the cot rail, and set his teeth against the fresh pains to come. When Kalenna reached for his left shoulder to aid him, he spared no thought for his dignity or his resolution to move his face as little as possible. "No, please!" he yelped, and the slit of vision left to his right eye winked out in a sudden blaze of misery. "My hip instead," Julian gasped. "If I can just roll over…"

They managed it, but the movement was excruciating. He had not stopped to think about his left arm, which did not follow the rolling of his torso. It trailed behind heavily instead, dragging on his shoulder and the nexus of grinding anguish in his back. At least the location of the discomfort, squarely under the trapezius at the base of his scapula, told Julian all he needed to know. He clung to the knowledge like a lifeline as Kalenna guided his legs over the edge of the bunk and he pushed himself up with his fatigued right arm.

The wave of awful vertigo erased all conscious thought, and then Julian's stomach clenched again — not in hunger, this time, but in rebellion. He tried to clamp his jaw shut against the rising tide, dimly and distantly understanding that he did not want to vomit down the front of the uniform he could not wash. But his body had its own ideas and he retched, fought to swallow, and then lost all control.

But he didn't feel the hot, horrible splash against his chest or into his lap: someone had snatched up a basin, and was holding it under his chin. Kalenna braced him upright as he heaved, helpless despite the aggravation to his bruised abdomen and his battered ribs, despite the sickening, white-hot torment in his cheekbone that radiated into his teeth and his jaw and his eye socket and his brain. There wasn't much to bring up: only bile and acid, thinned with water, and a couple of the wrinkled, peppercorn-like seeds. Exhausted and stupid with suffering, Julian finally found himself staring into the puddle of slop with disjointed fascination; not for the mess, so much as for the dish.

It wasn't a basin at all, just a round, concave tray with a thin, sharp lip all around it. It looked a little like the customized hubcaps on his holosuite alter-ego's sleek Aston Martin, the ones that could be used to smuggle diamonds or thumbnail-sized explosives. Only this was about half the size and far less elegant. There was a dent in one part of the rim that had clearly been made with Tain's prying tool. It must be some kind of circuit housing cover, salvaged from inside the wall.

The acrid stink of his watery vomit reached Julian's nose slowly, but when it did, he retched again. There was nothing left in him, not even a thin film of saliva, and so he waved the shallow bedpan away and curled over his lap, coughing and gagging dryly until he got ahold of himself again. He felt a hot flush of mortification creeping up the back of his neck as Kalenna returned and the door screeched open. Someone was carrying his mess away, it seemed. Cleaning up after him as if he were an infant or an invalid.

"Do you want water?" Kalenna asked with unwonted gentleness, bracing his swaying body with a hand on his right shoulder.

Julian did want water, desperately. He tried to nod, but that only brought on another wave of nausea. As he beat it back down, determined not to bring himself any more pain by way of dry heaves, he clung to the comfort of differential diagnosis. The pain alone might have been enough to bring on the violent physiological response, but he didn't believe that. He had been in pain before — greater pain than this, truth be told, for his current injuries were all the work of fists and feet and could not measure up to the searing, soul-crushing anguish of a third-degree plasma burn — and he'd never vomited. No, he was almost certainly concussed. And he was damned lucky there had been no blood in the basin along with the bile. Stomach, esophagus and throat were all intact.

That his throat was intact was something of a minor miracle. Julian's fingertips brushed the sides of his larynx, where the Second had gripped him so ferociously. He could feel hard bruises, but it might have been so much worse. His voice-box could have been crushed. His windpipe could have collapsed. He might have been strangled right there in the ring.

Kalenna had one of his bottles in hand. Julian tried to take it from her, but he didn't have the strength. He simply curled his hand around the cold cylinder under hers, and managed to lift his chin so that he could drink. She cupped the back of his head with her other palm, supporting it as it tilted. Julian was grateful, but he felt the sting of an open wound just above her fingers, and he remembered what she had told him about his scalp.

The first mouthful of water mixed instantly with the scum of vomit on his teeth and tongue, and the sour, noxious taste filled his mouth and flooded the sinuses on the left side of his head. Those on the right were too inflamed and outraged to process scent.  _Small mercies_ , Julian thought. Reflex told him to spit out the foul fluid, but he forced himself to swallow instead. It wasn't the cleansing sensation he craved, but he had no intention of wasting water, even now.

His next sip was more satisfying, but the third awoke an uneasy gurgle under his xyphoid process, and he slipped his lips off of the rim of the canteen. Kalenna took it away, seeming to understand. She set it on the nearest table and was back at his side almost at once, silent and watchful.

Julian had to perform a proper exam, and he couldn't do that while sitting on an unstable surface. The webbing beneath the pallet sagged under his thighs, and the frame felt spindly and fragile under the surely far-greater-than-normal weight of his injured body. He felt heavier than usual, anyway; at least twice his usual weight. His mass hadn't changed, except by maybe a hundred grams representing the contents of his unhappy stomach, so either his density had shifted, or the artificial gravity net was malfunctioning, or he was simply feeling the burden of suffering and exhaustion.

"Can you help me to the bench?" he whispered, once again speaking out of one corner of his mouth and trying not to move the other at all. He longed for a neural blocking agent. A quick application of a hypospray to the maxillary branch of his trigeminal nerve would have wiped away his most distracting problem in an instant, at least for an hour or two. He'd correctly identified the fracture: there was no need for him to keep feeling it.

Kalenna hoisted his right arm across her shoulders and slid near so that she could grip him around the waist. Her arm was low enough that she didn't put pressure on the tormented expanse of his back, but Julian had to choke back a moan as she gripped the tender, unprotected expanse between ribs and pelvis.  _You've bruised that kidney_ , his Doctor Voice intoned gravely.  _You're in for trouble_.

Kalenna tried to lift him, and he struggled to help her. He only succeeded in sliding forward a little as the cot's surface rippled beneath him. His hips and buttocks seemed to be stuck on the rail, sunken too far to slip easily off. Perhaps if he'd had more strength in his leg he could simply have stood, but that didn't feel like an achievable goal just at present. Kalenna seemed to agree: she gave up her efforts and let him sink back into the cradle of creaking webbing. Julian stared numbly at his knees, unable to muster the will to try again.

"General, can you take his other side?" the Romulan woman asked. "I know your left arm is not healed, but if you use your right—"

"Never mind my arm," Martok growled. Julian startled a little at his voice. He hadn't noticed the Klingon standing there, with his back to the rear wall of the barracks, watching all the while. He reached for Julian's left arm instinctually, but remembered himself before the human could vocalize a warning. Martok bowed lower and crossed his arm over Kalenna's instead, gripping Julian about the waist from the other side. There was an unexpected, deep twinge along his twelfth rib as the General's broad hand settled below it, but then they were lifting him and all his various miseries coalesced into one fiery blue giant: a veritable Bellatrix of pain.  _Gamma Orionis_ , his scholastic brain corrected. It was impolite to use the old Latin names when one was out in the Galaxy at large.

The single, whirling flame lasted only a few seconds before shattering back into two dozen different shards, but in that moment, Julian fervently wished for the mercy of a coma. It was only the need to be his own respirator that kept him focused, until his bony hips thumped down on the hard but stable surface of the table, and the chaos within him clarified a little. He understood what had happened when Martok withdrew his arm slowly, keeping his hand outstretched lest Julian tip over like a drunken donkey. The General hadn't grabbed his arm, but his broad shoulder had pushed against Julian's as he lifted, nudging it forward and stretching his trapezius and everything beneath it intolerably.

"May I please…" Julian began. He didn't have the strength to finish the sentence. He was leaning heavily to the right, against Kalenna's steady torso. "Water," he managed, the word sawing out over his teeth.

She reached for it, and he had to tighten his abdominal muscles to keep himself upright. The room was tilting obnoxiously, but his internal attitude meter was functioning well enough that he knew he was not canting with it. He sipped from the bottle when Kalenna held it to his lips, and curled forward over his lap again while he tried to keep his pulse under forty-five beats per minute. That seemed like top priority, since every  _lub-dub_  of his heart reverberated into his skull and his cheekbone and his ribs and his viscera. The fewer beats, the better.

His knee, too, he noticed at last. His right knee was throbbing again. It didn't feel especially painful or especially inflamed, not way up here on the other end of his femur, but he knew that might just be relative intensity: the comparatively minor pain of a hyperextended joint against battered organs and open fractures.

"I need someone to palp— to feel my back," he said when he had taken another cautious swallow of water and felt more capable of speech. His right eye was closed almost to a slit, but now that he was out in the middle of the room, he could see the opposite bulkhead and the familiar dark hulk leaning against it. Enabran Tain had come out of the wall while he slept, it seemed. He was watching Julian, but his expression was lost in a bloodshot blur.

"Major, my left shoulder blade. Put your right hand right next to my spine, and use the left to stabilize my shoulder. Then you need to push. Slow, steady pressure. I'll try to resist you."

Kalenna had been moving around to his other side, crossing in front of him. Now she hesitated. "You're injured on that side," she said warily.

"I know," Julian sighed leadenly, trying to explain despite his weariness. "That's why I need you to press it, so I can feel exactly where I'm injured."

"You want me to push on your back so you can find the source of the pain," she said. "Like you did with your eye socket."

"Yes." It was all he could manage; a tired huff of air. He wasn't sure he had the fortitude for this, and belabouring the point ahead of time was not going to make it easier.

"I… I can't," she said. Suddenly she didn't sound like a hardened soldier or a fearsome espionage operative. She sounded like a young girl, frightened and alone and eighty thousand lightyears from home. "It will hurt you."

"Yes," Julian said again. Then he understood what she was saying. "I'm already hurt, Major. You didn't do this to me. The exam won't make it any worse."

That might not be true. Palpating for a fracture was a tricky business, which was one of the reasons that doctors on Earth had been using one kind of contact-free imaging or another on such injuries for five hundred years.  _Four hundred seventy-eight_ , some part of his brain corrected smugly.

 _Oh, shut up_ , Julian told it.  _This is no time to show off_.

"I can't," Kalenna whispered. She was backing away from him, one hand pressed to the base of her throat. She looked horrified. "You did this for us, for all of us, and I can't… can't hurt you more."

Julian couldn't argue with her. He didn't have the strength. More, he didn't have the will. It took a certain sort of mettle to inflict suffering in the aid of healing, and not everyone possessed it. That was why doctors were held apart, even revered for their ability to do what must be done to aid their patients. It was unfair to expect a layperson to overcome their compunctions in an instant, especially when called upon to treat a friend.

At least, he hoped Kalenna thought of him as a friend. Her distress on his behalf suggested she might.

"I will do it, Doctor," Martok said. "I am no physician, but I will follow your instructions."

Klingons understood that sometimes pain was necessary, both to endure and to inflict. Of course Martok would step forward, but Julian didn't want him to do it. It wasn't just the clumsy way he had groped for Julian's pulse in the ring, or the fact that prior experience suggested Klingons might not make the most deft of nurses — Commander Worf's midwifery experience notwithstanding. This was a task that required two hands, and potentially some genuine force. Martok's elbow wasn't ready for this kind of undertaking, and if by some colossal mischance the joint slipped out again while he tried, Julian wasn't sure he'd have the wits, the balance, or the strength to reset it in his current state.

"No," he said, latching onto a diplomatic means of bowing out of the offer. "I need you in front, to brace me. Tain. Get behind me. You're going to palpate my back."

" _I_?" Tain drawled, in a tone of melodious astonishment that for an uncanny moment bore Julian back through the weeks and the Wormhole alike, to the clean and brightly lit Replimat. Garak, wide-eyed with faux innocence, denying some shrewd observation. Julian endured the pain in order to shudder, shaking off the comparison. Tain and Garak had worked together for many years; it made sense that the older man could imitate his protégé's tone when it suited his purposes. "Why, Doctor, I'm flattered, but I couldn't possibly."

"Yes, you can," Julian growled through his gritted lefthand molars. He was very judiciously  _not_  clamping the right side of his jaw. "Causing a little pain certainly won't confound you."

"It shouldn't confound the woman, either," Tain said with lazy contempt. "The Tal Shiar are legendary for their creative interrogation tactics. Why, the Romulan mind probe alone inflicts more agony than half a dozen of  _my_  methods combined."

Julian had a feeling that he was picking and choosing for that particular tally, but he didn't waste energy saying so.  _Other battles are for other days. You've done enough_. But Kalenna was standing right there, listening, and so he still exerted the energy needed to say; "Empathy deserves admiration, not contempt, Tain. She's done her share today."

"Some would argue that I have, too," Tain said silkily. "After all,  _I'm_  the one who successfully wired the life support system into the main power supply. It wasn't easy, Doctor. A couple of very sticky problems cropped up. It's remarkable that I was able to salvage the operation at all, much less in only seventy-five minutes."

 _Seventy-five minutes_? Julian felt a ripple of sickness that had little to do with his bodily struggles. He had known he'd outlasted the original estimate, but how had he managed to endure out there for an hour and a quarter?

"We're all grateful," he said heavily, suddenly wanting nothing more than to get this ordeal over with as quickly as he could. "Please, help me now."

Tain clicked his tongue. "Why, Doctor Bashir!" he sang. "It sound like you're asking me for a favour.  _Another_  favour."

Julian's skin, already rippled with gooseflesh from the cold, crawled with dread.  _The creeps_ , he thought, not for the first time. Tain gave him the creeps.

"I suppose I am," he said, although he knew better. All things bent to medical necessity, even common sense. He wanted to confirm his diagnosis, and he felt a burning need to know the specifics. He couldn't get either without Tain's help. Parvok hadn't returned yet, unless he'd found a way to walk right through a closed door. The Breen wouldn't understand his instructions. It had to be Tain. "Please."

Tain shrugged airily. "Well, since you asked so prettily," he chuckled. He came around the bench from behind and poked Julian on his right side, in the sixth intercostal space. "Tell me what to do."

"General, would you please come to my right side?" Julian asked. He was forgetting the mammoth effort it took to speak, now that he was in his professional frame of mind. He gave instructions to the two men, each fearsome in his own way, as he would have given them to his assistants or to trainee medics. "Put your go—your  _right_  arm across my chest. I'm going to lean against you, and… and I'll probably have to hold on."

Martok did as requested, his forearm with its sturdy bracer as immovable as a traction bar once it was in place. Julian positioned it a little lower, so it sat just below his pectoral muscles but safely above the worst of the bruising to his ribs. He curled his right hand up behind the General's elbow, and took a firm hold of his humerus. Telling himself he was ready, he took one last level breath, and explained to Tain what he needed him to do.

( _fade_ )

The Jem'Hadar had broken his scapula. It was one of most stable and inaccessible bones in the human body, protected from fracture by its broad distribution of pressure over the support of the ribcage, and by the complex layers of muscles that held and supported and overlaid it. Even in the days of the internal combustion engine, when gristly high-speed vehicular collisions were commonplace and exerted extraordinary forces on the bodies within, the scapula accounted for less than one percent of human fractures. These days, the incidence rate hovered at around point three-three percent. The sheer improbability of the event made Julian feel irrationally angry. It made him feel worse than unlucky. It made him feel cursed.

He knew it could have been worse. The glenoid neck and fossa were still intact. The acromion was intact. The fracture was partial, non-displaced, and close to the lateral midline of the bone. It wouldn't have required traction or fixation prior to application of the osteogenic stimulator. In the absence of such a miraculous tool, all the arm needed was immobilization and six to eight weeks of healing. It had still hurt like hell when Tain had strained the break.

Julian wasn't accustomed to assessing a fracture by the sensations on the other side of the exam. He was used to being the one with the steady hands, feeling the inappropriate give of the bone beneath his experienced palms. Feeling it inside of his body, the yawning wrongness of it had been far worse than the agony — and there  _had_ been agony, plenty of it. But his diagnosis was firm and his grim curiosity satisfied. There was some comfort in knowing what was going on his body, even if the pain of the examination would be slow to fade.

Similarly, he had made Tain feel his ribs. There were less definitive answers there. The fourth and fifth on the left might be cracked, or merely bruised into the marrow. The others were only bruised, even the delicate little twelfth on his right side, and Julian did not need to endure the ordeal of writhing out of his layers of uniform to know his left flank was black and blue from armpit to pelvis. He could feel it. He was afraid for his kidney, but there was nothing he could do for it but try to stay hydrated as best he was able, and ride out the storm.

Kalenna had been reluctant to be his hands, but she had no compunctions about bandaging and proved a very capable nurse. She tore a square from the remnant of the spare blanket, and put his left arm in a sling. When it was secured with the unwieldy knot in the hollow of his left collarbone — so as to avoid any unexpected pressure on his broken cheek while he slept — she had followed his instructions and used two of the grimy strips to bind his humerus to his body. This accomplished two things, further immobilizing the arm while also supporting his ribs.

Julian explored his skull cautiously, once he had mustered his resolve again. He had two small hematomas, hard and granular under his scalp. At the base of his parietal plate, the crescent-shaped laceration was scabbed over and stinging, his unwashed hair matted with blood. In the other places he had been hit, the flesh just felt faintly spongy. He had no doubts about the concussion. The nausea was back, slow and low, and his thoughts were clumsy and disordered. He tried counting Fibonacci numbers and he could do it, but the effort exhausted him. He needed a regimen of cortical analeptics, inpedrezine for a start, and a night under observation with a neural monitor. He wasn't going to get either.

The worst part of the whole ordeal came when the examination and bandaging were finished. It was almost time for curfew, and Julian had yet to wash Talak'ran's blood from his hands. He didn't want to express this need to the others, fearing what they might think of him. Instead, he confessed, tiredly and not without a little genuine embarrassment, that he needed to make use of the waste reclamation facilities before the lockdown, and he required an escort.

It seemed his cellmates had come to some agreement while he slept, for without so much as a glance at Major Kalenna, Parvok came to Julian's side. He helped him to stand, avoiding his left side entirely, and they shuffled together down the corridor. It wasn't much more than twenty metres, but to Julian it felt like a full forty-two kilometre marathon. He was exhausted long before they reached the door, and the wait for one of the units seemed an eternity.

The one mercy of their sparse rations was that he did not need to perform the task that would have necessitated slipping out of the sleeves of his jumpsuit. He was able to keep his clothes and his dressings more or less in place, though it was difficult to rearrange his lower layers one-handed. Parvok's charge apparently did not extend to helping with this task, but he stood nearby in case Julian should need to seize him for balance. He passed a small quantity of urine, his flank and his bladder burning as he did so. It was too dark in the vile-smelling room for Julian to get a diagnostic glimpse of the colour of the fluid, but he didn't really need to. Even over the other stenches, he could smell the blood.

He cleaned his right hand twice, watching as the crusted cruor melted away. His torn knuckles stung in the disinfecting beam, but the sterilization would do them good. It took some awkward manoeuvring to get his left hand into the alcove without loosening the bindings or pulling on the sling, but at least Julian was able to lean his right shoulder on the wall as he did it. His legs felt rubbery and disobedient when he finally started back towards Barracks 6, and he leaned heavily on Parvok. They had just passed the door of Barracks 4 when they gave out beneath him.

Julian sank to his knees in slow motion, his fall dampened but not prevented by the contrite Sub-Lieutenant. Julian braced his palm on the floor and subsisted there for a while, heaving shallow, enervating breaths while worn-out boots scurried past him. Other prisoners, finding their way to their beds.

"You must get up," Parvok urged, shaking Julian's shoulder. "There isn't much time. You must get up."

Julian could hear him, and understood both the words and the fear of the curfew. He didn't know the consequences for breaking it: as with the consequences of failing the morning inspection, he had not had the courage to ask. It was simpler to follow these rules, which although demeaning were not painful, than to risk reprisal from the Jem'Hadar.

Only tonight, it _was_ painful to obey. So painful. Julian was ground down by the deeds of the day, shivering with pain and the pervasive chill of the orbital night. The idea of getting back on his feet was intolerable.

Parvok was squatting by him now, arms wrapped around Julian's one good one, trying to hoist him up. "We've got to get moving," he pleaded, not much above a whisper. "Come on, just a few more steps."

It wasn't the steps that confounded him, but the act of rising. Julian's head hung heavily. His back was burning. Every limb ached.

"I'm going to fetch the Major and the General," Parvok said apologetically, releasing his hold on Julian as he stood up again. "You won't listen to me, but maybe they can convince you."

Julian wanted to explain that it wasn't that he was refusing to listen. He was just too beaten down to do what was being asked of him. It didn't seem fair that Parvok should judge him so harshly on this one failing, when he had done everything else required of him today. All of it, right to the bitter end.

He slipped off of his shins, letting his legs curl under him. He wasn't kneeling anymore, but sitting with his right hip on the floor and his left boosted up by his ankle. His knee didn't like this position, but it was only a handful of strained ligaments and an inflamed meniscus, weighed against a head the size of Neptune and a trunk full of bruises and a scrambled kidney and possibly as many as four cracked bones. The knee didn't get a vote.

A hand closed on Julian's right shoulder briefly, and then slid into his armpit. There was something wrong about it. It felt too bulky for a humanoid hand, too unwieldy. Only when the other one took hold of his right thigh, just a little above the newly reapplied bandage Julian had been staring at, did he realize that was because they were both wearing gloves. The gloves were sealed to the sandy sleeves above them with flexible flange rings: an airtight seal, like an EVA suit. An environmental suit. A refrigeration suit.

Julian sucked in a harsh gasp of startled astonishment and no small amount of pain as the two hands slid across his body, one spanning his back at an ungainly angle to avoid the areas where he had instructed Tain to press, repeatedly and methodically. The other slipped under both knees. In a single, fluid motion that would have been beyond even Martok's strength if he'd had the full use of both arms, the Breen rose to their feet, hauling Julian with them. He had to get his arm around the armoured neck, gripping the far shoulder, to keep himself balanced, and then he was being carried like a child past the door to Barracks 5 and on to Barracks 6. It was only a few steps, as Parvok had promised, but he should have been too much of a burden.

The door shrieked open even before Julian could wonder how either he or his silent bearer would manage it. Kalenna stood there, her expression of laborious determination turning to wonderment as she saw them. She stepped aside hurriedly, and the Breen carried Julian over the threshold and straight to his cot. Someone had smoothed the thin pallet and plumped up the pillow as much as was possible, and as he was eased onto it, Julian made sure he was settling on his right hip. There was an awkward moment of decoupling, and his shoulder fell the last couple of centimetres as the Breen slipped free, but it was his good shoulder and the impact was bearable.

Julian rolled a little farther onto his front, lest his left shoulder should graze the wall that was almost at his back. He looked up at the Breen, unable to lift his temple from the pillow. Kalenna was already at the foot of the cot, spreading Julian's blanket over him. There was only one blanket again, but he was glad of that. The others needed what warmth they could get tonight, and he would have had to make them take back their bedding anyhow. This way, they'd spared him the argument.

Julian looked up at the broad, beaked helmet with its inscrutable pattern of scrolling lights. Knowing his words would be gibberish to his rescuer's ears (did Breen even have ears?), he spoke them anyway, hoping that his tone and expression, at least, were understood.

"Thank you," he murmured thickly, still speaking out of the left side of his mouth.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**endorphins:** the body's natural analgesics (pain-killers), released in response to physical stress, such as trauma or exercise.

 **zygomatic fracture:** a broken cheekbone.

 **differential diagnosis:** a review performed by a physician or other diagnostician of the conditions that could be caused by a cluster of symptoms.

 **xyphoid process:** the hard triangle of cartilage at the base of the sternum (breastbone).

 **maxillary branch of trigeminal nerve:** the nerve branch responsible for sensation in the middle third of the face.

 **glenoid neck, glenoid fossa:** the area of the scapula (shoulder blade) that connects to the shoulder.

 **acromion:**  the area of the scapula that connects to the clavicle (collarbone).

 **lateral:** away from the centre of the body. In humanoids, the centre of the body is the line that includes the nose, the spine, the breastbone, and the navel.

 **hematoma:**  a hard "bubble" of blood under the skin. On the scalp, colloquially known as a "goose egg".

 **parietal plate:** the flat part of the back of the skull.

 **cortical analeptic (pharm.):** a 24th Century medication used as a neural stimulant, often to treat a concussion. (Ep. 3.26, "The Adversary")

 **inpedrezine (pharm.):** a 24th Century medication used after serious head trauma. (Ep. 3.18, "Distant Voices")


	31. In Restless Dreams

**Part VI, Act II: In Restless Dreams**

The pain was unbearable. It had surged up to swallow him as soon as he tried to move, to pick himself up out of the dust of this semiarid world so that he could press on. He had to press on. People were counting on him. Dozens of lives relied on the machines suddenly rendered useless when the underground field hospital lost power. The medical staff was fighting to keep them alive with medication and those handheld devices that had independent power sources; defibrillators, emergency respirators, hyposprays, warming blankets. It was a desperate push to stave off death, like trying to bail out an scuttled galleon with a child's sand pail. If Julian didn't bring back the generator, they would lose that battle and all of those patients he and the others had laboured so hard to save would die.

His left arm was afire with tendrils of oozing torment. He was afraid to look, but Julian forced himself to do it. It was better to know, wasn't it? As his eyes fell upon the gruesome, charred pulp of bloody flesh that showed through the singed tatters of his sleeve, Julian reconsidered that assumption. He couldn't see much through the soot and the settling cloud of dust and the fog inexplicably swimming before his eyes, but even with the blast pattern obscured, the searing, blind totality of the pain told him what he needed to know.

Plasma burns, second and third degree. Maybe fourth, in a patch just over the knob of his elbow. Julian didn't think he could see the bone, but was that blackened, ropey thing his common flexor tendon? The thought filled him with a wave of panicked nausea, and he cast his eyes away, up at the boulder that was sheltering him from the Klingons' line of sight. He forced a spastic breath through his nostrils, snuffling against the settling dust.  _The pain, oh, God, the pain…_

Third degree thermal burns were relatively painless: the flame or blast or scalding vapour destroyed the nerve endings along with the dermis. Plasma burns, however, paradoxically spared the nerves even as they gnawed away skin, muscle, even bone. The resultant agony was unrelenting. They were notoriously the most excruciatingly painful battlefield injury a humanoid body could be expected to endure. Trying to master himself, to focus, Julian slid his right arm beneath his trembling body and forced himself to sit up.

The anguish was exquisite: a masterwork of suffering. But the vertigo was worse. If it hadn't been for the rock beside him, Julian would have fallen. He leaned into it instead, pushing with a boot that slid stiltedly in the fine, pale soil. The blood was ringing in his ears with the roar of a tidal ocean, but he thought the world outside his auditory canal had gone silent. The artillery barrage had stopped. Blinking through a haze of dizziness and tears of pain, he tried to make sense of the landscape. He was looking back in the direction he and Jake had come, at the streaks of their scrambling feet in the dust, at the craters where the Klingon mortars had detonated. There was one just short of Julian's leg, shrapnel scattered in the earth. He should have been terrified by that sight, by the nearness of the explosion that could have done far more than chew up his arm. But another thought held precedence in the hierarchy of dread.

 _JAKE_!

He had meant to call the boy's name aloud, but his throat was raw and tight. No sound emerged. Julian scanned the landscape frantically, searching for any sign of his young companion. There was none, at least none that he could see from this vantage. Frantic desperation and dismay were enough to haul him to his feet, scrabbling up the side of the boulder one-handed. He thrust his hip against it, legs trying to bow and buckle beneath him, head swimming. But even up here, he couldn't see Jake.

 _What have you done? What have you done? Damn you, Bashir, what have you done?_  his heart howled. He had known better than to bring his Captain's only child to this planet. He had known better than to drag a civilian teenager to the front lines of a cruel and bloody war. He had known  _better_ , God damn it to hell! But Jake had argued with him, persuaded him, practically begged him to detour. And he had used those words no doctor could ignore:  _there are lives at stake: these people need you!_

And it was true. The hospital was hopelessly overrun, Doctor Kalandra and her staff almost at the end of their tether. Two surgeons, working 'round the clock to triage the casualties, even as more poured in. Julian's arrival had increased their operating capacity by fifty percent. They had needed him. They needed him still. And they needed that generator.

There was no choice. He couldn't sacrifice the lives of so many people, so many patients, in a futile search for one young man — not even one Julian had brought into danger himself. The hospital needed its power restored immediately, if not sooner, and Julian didn't know how long he had been unconscious.

 _Whatever happens, one of us has to get that generator_. They were almost the last words he had said to Jake before they'd been separated by another blast: Julian diving forward into the shelter of the next boulder, Jake wisely taking refuge behind the last one. It was possible, truly possible, that having seen him fall, the youth had pressed on over the ridge. He was so like his father, and Julian knew that in this situation, Captain Sisko would have made the right choice, leaving behind one fallen crewman in the push to save so many other lives. Jake might have done the same.

And if he hadn't, Julian had to. He gathered himself up, still clinging to the boulder until his feet were firmly planted and his back almost straight. He took one hesitant step with his right hand still gripping the rock, and then he ran for the ridge.

He thought he had steeled himself against the pain, but the jarring impact of every increasingly erratic step slammed into his shoulder and down into his scorched and bleeding arm. He could feel all of it: the trickle of fluid along his radius, the throb of his pulse where the thin skin of his inner wrist was blistered and oozing, the twitch and spasm of dying muscle, and most of all the horrific, lingering heat of the plasma blast. Julian stumbled on the incline and crashed to his knees, shredding the cloth of his uniform trousers and scraping his right palm raw. His knuckles were raw, too, stinging insistently despite the larger misery on the other side of his body. Funny: he didn't remember grazing his knuckles, not on Ajilon Prime.

The generator. That was all that mattered. If he didn't press on, stay active, keep moving, he would soon find himself unable to move at all. Shock was taking hold, and soon the pain would swallow him completely. Julian struggled up the hill, now shuffling on both feet, now scrambling on hand and knees. His left arm was useless, swinging lifeless at his side. Only dead limbs didn't hurt like this, did they? A part of him, a half-crazed, fatalistic part that didn't like his chances of getting off this rock alive, thought it might have been kinder if the explosion had just taken the arm clean off instead. Surely anything was better than this?

When he saw the runabout, pristine and untouched in a hollow of the land, Julian changed his mind about that. Plasma burns could be healed: he'd been healing them himself for almost fifty-two sleepless hours straight. With prompt medical care from a competent physician, he would regain full use of his arm in a few short days. He needed his arm: he was a surgeon. And when he got out of here, he would be a surgeon again, whatever the Jem'Hadar — no, the Klingons. Whatever the  _Klingons_  thought.

He was having difficulty judging distances: he slammed straight into the side of the runabout because he didn't come to a stop quickly enough. Panting, his brow pressed to smooth tritanium baked hot in the noonday sun, Julian groped for the control panel and entered the access code to open the door. He tried to climb over the threshold adroitly, but his foot slipped and he crashed forward, barking his shin on the lip of the port and falling flat on the carpeted deck plating. The world went very grey for a few moments, but Julian clung to consciousness with the tenacity that so often got him into trouble. Even as he picked himself up off the ground and slithered forward to drag his legs into the reinforced shell of the small craft, he shuddered with despair. The runabout was empty: Jake wasn't here.

The portable generator was tucked away in its locker in the aft bulkhead. He crawled to it and dragged it out one-handed, his whole body straining. It weighed fifty kilograms. Julian himself topped the scales at sixty-four on a heavy day. He hadn't even paused to think about it before telling Jake and Doctor Kalandra that he'd need help carrying it. It was a job for four good arms. He had one.

None of that could be helped. Julian crawled backwards to the door, dragging the generator after him. When it caught on the ledge of the exit, he climbed to his feet, inching himself up the door frame with the aid of his good hand, leaning heavily on the runabout the whole way. His left foot slid in the soil. The pain was deepening, mounting in intensity. He was distantly aware that he was shivering.  _Decompensating_. Slipping into shock.

He closed his bony fist around the upper handle of the generator, puzzled that in the moment of clarity where every contour of his hand — thin, slender fingers, the web of fine, raised veins, the protuberance of his wrist — seemed drawn as if by a draftsman's pen, he couldn't see the abrasions that pricked at his knuckles. His olive-toned flesh was unbroken, despite the unmistakable sensation.

There was no time to think about that, and Julian had the curious sense that no such thought had entered his mind at all. He'd been thinking about the weight, not his knuckles, and when he hauled the generator up and over the rim of the door, he had not been surprised by the force it took.

But a quick hoist and drop was one thing. Actually carrying it was another. He tried, his arm straining and his elbow pulled straight to lock. He got four whole, dragging paces before he dropped it. The  _clunk_  of the metal casing and the puff of dust that rose around it made him cringe. He looked up the slope at the crest of the rise. It was a smaller ascent than the one on the other side, but it seemed insurmountable like this. Julian stared down at his arm, his other arm: the one wrapped in cooked layers of flesh, giving off a charnel-house stench of gore and singed hair and melted fabric. He could feel the hot ripples of pain with every hammering knell of his straining heart.

 _You can feel it. You can feel it_.

There was something significant about that, but it took Julian a slow, grinding eternity of sluggish thought to think what it might be. Scarcely two seconds passed in real time — he could measure them by the thumping in his chest and his junky respirations.  _Rales_ , he thought vacantly. There was fluid in his alveoli. He tried to ease his breathing, to exert that uncanny control over his vital signs and his smooth muscles that was an integral part of his unnaturalness. He couldn't do it: he was too weak. He wheezed instead and tried to remember what was so important about the fact that he could feel his arm.

 _Oh. Of course: silly me_! The thought was almost comical, pleasantly surprised. He had solved it!

If he could feel his arm, the sensory nerves were undamaged. It was the cruel hallmark of a plasma burn. But if the sensory nerves were undamaged, so were his motor nerves. If he could feel his arm, he could move his arm: it was as simple as that.

He moved it. It took all of his will and almost all of his sanity, but Julian shifted the burned limb away from his body. He twisted a wrist that crackled with new-forming eschar, stretched fingers mercifully unburned by a blast that had blistered the back of his hand, and he closed both fists on the generator handle. He hoisted.

Anguish unknowable blotted out the sun, but Julian was already staggering forward, shuffling crab-legged up the hill with his right foot on the high ground and his left digging in below. His right arm was bearing as much of the weight as it could. His brutalized left took up the remaining slack. He toiled up the incline, every fibre of his consciousness absorbed in the effort and the knowledge that he had no choice but to haul this burden back to the mouth of the tunnel — an interminable, impossible kilometre away.

He overbalanced when the terrain shifted, suddenly falling away beneath him. Julian slipped and slid and skidded, trying to keep his feet. He did, but he couldn't maintain his hold on the generator. It crashed to ground again, and this time it slid away from him, shooting down the slope like a child's winter sled. Horrified, he scrambled after it, falling to one knee as he approached the place where it had ground to a halt, stopped by a mound of earth ploughed up by its passage.

He couldn't regain his feet, not on this downhill angle. He pushed the generator ahead of him instead, left knee dragging in the dirt while his right foot propelled him. He could guide the generator one-handed, and he made good progress until the ground levelled out. Then it was crawl or rise, so he rose, swaying perilously and fighting a seismic tremor of nausea, dizziness and anguish. But Julian lifted the generator again, clutching the broader side handle this time. They were supposed to be durable units, battle-ready and able to sustain impacts at crash-landing forces. He hoped Starfleet didn't inflate their engineering specs just to save face.

He gained a few more metres — he couldn't tell how many — before his knees gave out. He clambered to his feet again, now not far from the boulder he had been headed for when he took the blast. Julian couldn't lift the generator again. His nerves might still be functional, but the charred sinews of his arm had given up. It was heavy, lifeless, and burning at his side. He got in front of the generator instead and stooped to grab the handle with his functional hand. He dragged it after him, watching over the bleeding pulp of his blackened shoulder so he could follow the trailing footprints back towards the mouth of the cave. The stench was terrible.

Julian's eyes kept straying to the lee of each boulder he passed, looking for a pile of gangly limbs, for the huddled bulk of a human body, even for a scrap of vest or a lost shoe that might tell him what had happened to Jake. He was desperate for some sign, and yet he dreaded it. What would he do if he came across the broken and charred body of Captain Sisko's son? Worse, what would he do if the boy he had started thinking of as a friend in his own right, wounded and incapacitated but still alive? In such a case, Julian knew the right thing to do would be to leave Jake and press on, to deliver the generator and save the patients and send help back after the fact. But he didn't know if he would have the fortitude to carry through with such a plan. He didn't know if he could abandon Jake twice.

_You put yourself into dangerous situations all the time!_

_Maybe. But that's not the same as putting you into one._

Why had he come here? What had he done?

Julian stumbled again, crumpling in the dust. His chest heaved and his body quaked to the marrow. Trickles of perspiration had been running into his eyes. They were crawling into his hairline now, because he was curled over his treacherous legs with his face upside-down and his forehead in the dirt. He unclamped his aching fingers from the generator and used his good hand to push himself back up. He couldn't see the cave, or even the cliff face above it. Everything beyond a few metres' distance was lost in the glare of the sun and the fog in his mind.

Only a kilometre from the runabout to the hospital. It was such a short distance: not even a quarter of the circumference of the Docking Ring on Deep Space Nine. At the Academy, Julian used to jog a kilometre in five minutes as a comfortable warm-up before a  _real_  run. Now, it seemed an unimaginable expanse, a distance too great to be contemplated by the human mind — like the vacant vacuum between two far-flung galaxies. He tried to tug the generator forward, dragging it again. He couldn't. He had to.

He crept around behind it instead, and pushed. Crawling now, bowed over his burden in the panting span between each stretching exertion, Julian followed the tracks in the sand. Thank God there was no wind. Thank God the artillery barrage hadn't obliterated all sign of their passage. His tracks and Jake's tracks, guiding him back. His throat stung and tears prickled in his eyes, this time not purely from the pain.  _Oh, Jake, what have I done to you_?

He heard a rumble as of thunder, and then a piercing, telltale whistle of flying ordnance. Julian cringed at the sound of the first explosion, flattening himself over the generator and tucking his head. But that was a waste of time, and he had so little time left. he could feel the agony in his arm overwhelming him: it was spreading now, into his chest and across his shoulder-blade and down into his ribs and his flank and his kidney. Incongruously, the right side of his face burned, too, although he hadn't taken any damage to his head at all, or his right side, for that matter. As he struggled, almost on his belly now, to push the generator forward a few more decimetres, Julian could not understand where these other pains had come from.

The next explosion almost failed to penetrate his fog of misery. It was far away, anyhow: up on the rise.  _The runabout_ , he thought distantly. But the runabout didn't matter. He had the only piece of it that mattered, if he could only push it onward just a few… more… metres…

Someone shouted. Booted feet thundered in the sandy soil. A dark shadow moving at a brisk, disciplined clip that made Julian ashamed of his own pathetic attempts to propel himself.  _That_  was how a Starfleet officer was supposed to move, dammit. Not slithering through the dust like a dog with a broken leg.

The generator jerked away from him, and the head of a phaser rifle swung close to his temple. A broad-shouldered young man in the heavy, quilted jacket of a ground troop battalion was squatting in front of Julian, holding his weapon at the ready with one hand while the other hauled on the generator. He couldn't lift it one-handed, either, Julian noticed with some small measure of vindication. The soldier pulled and the doctor pushed, and all of a sudden they were in the shadows and the cool dryness of the cave.

"Casualty!" the soldier hollered. "We've got a casualty here!"

More feet running. Julian didn't care. He rolled onto his hip, his skinned knees unable to hold him any longer, and he sagged against the roughly cut wall of the tunnel. Neither supine nor sitting, he slumped there, his charred arm cradled across his aching abdomen. He heard his name distantly, spoken by an anxious voice that was lately familiar but brought him no comfort. Doctor Kalandra.

"Doctor Bashir? Doctor? Oh, my God…" She wavered, dismayed, and then started shouting brisk orders. "Get me a medkit and a hypospray: triptacederine, stat. You two, get that generator into the ward and wired in as quickly as you can. I'm going to need the OR immediately — Kirby, bring a stretcher!"

Julian felt a hand on his face. It should have felt cool on burning skin: he remembered how it had felt cool, soothing. But he was so cold, so perniciously cold. All except for his arm, which was burning, aching, throbbing with the rhythm of his heart. He couldn't feel Kalandra's hand at all anymore. Guilt and misery washed over him. He had brought them the generator, but he had lost Jake. He had lost Jake, and Jake was probably dead, and how would Julian explain to Captain Sisko? What had he done? What kind of a monster brought a kid to a warzone? What kind of mutant… but he was falling, falling in the blackness and the frigid void, and he could not bear to think any longer!

He awoke with a start, shivering so violently that the flimsy cot squeaked and rattled beneath him.

 _(fade_ )

It took a long time for Julian to shake off the hold of the nightmare. Gradually his breathing slowed and his pulse fell back to normal. The shivering didn't stop: it had invaded the dream from reality, and his body was struggling to keep itself warm in the bitter chill of the barracks. But he was almost glad of that, because it gave him something to focus on, something tangible to anchor himself in the present. Not that his present had much to recommend it, but at least it was far removed from that hellscape of remorse and helplessness that was that tortured half-hour in Ajilon Prime.

Only half an hour, from the moment he and Jake Sisko had left Kirby in the east tunnel of the underground hospital to the moment Doctor Kilandra had started charting his treatment for second, third, and yes, just above his elbow, fourth degree plasma burns. It had seemed like a Sisyphean eternity to Julian, lost in the agony and toil and the all-consuming guilt. He imagined it had felt like hours to the hospital staff, too, as they fought to keep the patients alive until his meandering return. Doctor Kalandra had never given him a straight answer about that, but it was one more shard of culpability for Julian to carry in his heart. If he'd been quicker to return, he could have spared the staff strain and the patients suffering. The one consolation was that they hadn't lost even one life in those thirty minutes, waiting for him. Not one.

Not even Jake's, though the torment of that terror had outlasted the worst of the plasma burns. When Julian had finally come to in the Intensive Care ward —  _er, the Intensive Care cave_  — he had been clean and tended, clad in a pale hospital gown. He remembered the sharp, antiseptic smell of the dermaline gel slathered up and down his arm, and the cool feeling of the endothermic dressings it was wrapped in. He had still been in pain that the triptacederine could not entirely mask, his whole body weakened by the trauma. He had been nauseous, too, and unbearably thirsty despite the intravenous fluids being pumped into his leg, but worst of all had been the conviction that he had left Jake to die.

When the young man had appeared at the mouth of the cavern, hesitantly approaching the bed, Julian had scarcely believed his eyes. Jake Sisko, alive and ambulatory and almost completely unharmed. Julian had cried out in joy and wonder and abject relief, straining his hoarse throat and paying a dear ransom of pain as he pulled himself far enough off of the pillows to clutch the front of Jake's vest and pull him close, so desperate to convince himself the apparition was real. And he had been so certain Jake would hate him, would tear into him with the recriminations he so richly deserved.

Staring across the narrow barracks at Enabran Tain's slumbering mass, Julian felt his empty stomach do a slow barrel roll of remorse. Jake had not died that day, but he had gone through a different kind of irreversible ordeal. Julian hadn't learned the details until they were once more safe on Deep Space Nine. Reading Jake's introspective account of the Battle of Ajilon Prime, Julian had been shocked and dismayed to learn what the boy had endured while he had been dragging his disobedient body and the desperately needed generator across a barren kilometre of dust, and later lying under Doctor Kalendra's deft surgeon's hands. Jake had suffered through a trial of fortitude and courage that would have been too much for many men twice his age, and it was all Julian Bashir's fault.

Not just because he had brought Jake to Ajilon Prime in the first place, either. They each had some share of blame in that. Julian's was greater, because he was the adult, he was the Starfleet officer, he had been in command of the runabout and the responsibility for the detour was ultimately his. But at least Jake had taken part in that decision; had, in fact, been the prime instigator. With time, and because in the end Jake had emerged at least physically unscathed, and with a new-found wisdom that, though born of suffering, would make him a better man, Julian had come to terms with that decision.

The choice he could not live with was the choice he had made over the body of the fibrillating young woman, when he had turned to Jake so casually, so reflexively, and said, regarding the precious generator,  _I'll need help carrying it, though._

_I'll need help carrying it, though._

Six little words. He had believed them. Julian clung to the conviction that he had genuinely believed them to be true. To carry a fifty kilogram generator swiftly over a one kilometre distance was a two-person job. Everything he knew about human strength and endurance said it was so: mathematics demanded it.

Only he wasn't quite human, was he?

Because he  _had_  carried that generator alone. Not only alone, but with plasma burns severe enough to incapacitate the strongest of human men. He had been losing blood and fluids steadily all the way from the boulder to the runabout, and all the long journey back to the hospital. He had needed two transfusions on the operating table, and aggressive hydration and electrolyte support through the long night in IC. And still he had managed to carry the generator alone, because he  _wasn't_  a human man, not in any true sense. He was a genetic freak, designed to be stronger, hardier, more resilient. "Superior", misguided megalomaniacs had once believed.

If Julian had been more honest about his genetic enhancements, even just to himself, he might have known that he could carry the generator alone. He might have dared to admit he could take on the mission by himself. Jake could have stayed safely below ground, and been spared his harrowing experience in the trenches. It was even possible that, without Jake to run back for in the chaos of the shelling, Julian would not have sustained the burns in the first place. He could have been to the runabout and back in fifteen minutes instead of thirty, and how much energy and stress and resources might that have spared Doctor Kalandra and her staff?

He screwed his eyes closed — the left one, anyway. The right socket was still swollen to a slit. Julian thought maybe it had gotten worse, lying as he was on his right side with gravity disadvantageous to the broken zygoma. He couldn't lie in any other position right now. Though judging from the intensity of the bone-deep ache in his left arm (doubtless the pain that had worked its way so vividly into his dream of remembrance), he wasn't doing much to ease his other fracture, either. Julian wormed his right hand free of his hip, which had trapped it somehow, and kneaded at his deltoid. It felt bruised and tender, but his touch couldn't ease the misery. There was nothing wrong with the arm: it was referred pain from his scapula.

The shivering was easing up a little. Now that he was awake, his hypothalamus was adjusting its messages to the rest of his body. Julian knew he should be grateful to even have such a regulatory mechanism. Tain didn't. A third of the prison population was doing without tonight, sinking deeper into a cold-drugged stupor.

Then again, Julian didn't have much sympathy to spare for Enabran Tain tonight. He had enjoyed his work this evening, had enjoyed inflicting suffering on a person telling him, methodically if increasingly breathlessly, how to do it. He had even admitted as much, meandering around front to peer quizzically at Julian while he still clutched Martok's arm, desperately trying not to faint from the pain and physical outrage of having his fractured scapula spread beneath the Cardassian's hard palms.

"That was actually quite a delightful experience, Doctor," he had said with cheerful relish. "I think I may just understand now why you so enjoy your work!"

The taunt and the implication that he  _enjoyed_  the suffering he had to inflict in the course of some treatments had driven a stake into Julian's heart that rivalled the one thrust through from the broken bone. He didn't suppose he had any right to expect better, not even in a moment of vulnerability like that. He had done bleak and bloody work today. He could still feel the resistance of the muscles in the Jem'Hadar's throat as he yanked out the Ketracel White port with his bare hands. He could still feel the revulsion at what he had done, and at what he was. No better than Khan, or any of the other eugenic freaks who had gone before him. Worse, because he couldn't even be honest with himself, much less those around him. Hiding, diminishing his abilities and trying to make himself smaller, lesser, in order to protect himself had become a way of life. And on Ajilon Prime, Jake had paid the price for Julian's craven dishonesty.

 _I hope I don't regret this_ , he had said as he brought the little ship about, laying in the course for the beleaguered colony. And he did regret it. He would regret it for the rest of his life, just as he would regret what he had done to Talak'ran today. Knowing he had done the right thing in both cases didn't make it any easier to bear.

Julian did not sleep again that night.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**fourth degree burn:** a burn through the full thickness of skin and adipose (fatty) tissue, that damages structures beneath, such as muscles, tendons or bone.

 **common flexor tendon:** a large tendon attached to the elbow joint, largely responsible for flexing the forearm.

 **auditory canal:** the ear canal.

 **rales:** a crackling or popping sound in the lungs, usually caused by fluid.

 **alveoli:** tiny, balloon-like sacs in the lungs, where blood gas exchange takes place.

 **sensory nerves:** the nerves responsible for conveying the sense of touch, including pain, from the body to the brain.

 **motor nerves:** the nerves responsible for conveying commands for movement from the brain to the body.

 **eschar** : a hard, crusted layer of necrotic (dead) tissue that forms after a body part is burned.

 **triptacederine (pharm.):** a potent 24th Century anesthetic and analgesic. (Ep. 2.22, "The Wire")

 **dermaline gel (pharm.):** a 24th Century topical treatment for burns. ( _Voyager_  Ep. 2.21, "Deadlock")

 **endothermic dressing (tech.):**  a dressing that radiates cold.


	32. The Assassin's Heart

_Note: Some minor worldbuilding acrobatics to explain why they're still using mmHg to measure blood pressure in the 24th Century. Thanks again, "Voyager"!_

**Part VI, Act III: The Assassin's Heart**

Julian was still lost in grim musings about Ajilon Prime when the others began to stir from sleep. Starfleet had awarded him the Medal of Valour for his "exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice" in the field. On previous occasions when he had been recognized for exemplary service or heroism, Julian had been proud and eager, but this was different. He didn't think he had ever felt more uncomfortable in his dress uniform than he had that evening in the wardroom, when Captain Sisko had presented him with the medallion in front of most of his nurses, the entire senior staff, and several selected civilian guests — most prominently Jake and Leeta, who at the time had still been Julian's lover. Quark had been called upon to cater the affair, so at least there had been ready access to alcohol to occupy Julian's flighty hands and blunt the razor edge of unease after the little ceremony.

The citation from Starfleet Medical for his work in the hospital had been a different matter: that he had accepted over subspace, gladly, without pomp or bluster. Even if somebody  _had_ made a fuss, Julian didn't think he would have minded as much. It, at least, he had earned on his own merits. It hadn't been handed to him, as the Medal of Valour had, for stamina and fortitude he owed solely to illegal genetic tampering. Julian had earned his medical education for himself, with determination and years of hard work. Becoming a doctor and practicing medicine was the one truly worthwhile thing he had done in his life. He was far more proud of that than of his ugly struggle with his burned body.

Then again, though he tried never to think about it, it was possible that he would have been incapable of qualifying for any institute of higher learning at all, much less the most prestigious and most competitive medical school in the Federation, without the benefit of those same enhancements. So maybe there wasn't such a difference between the citation for his work and the medal for his obstinacy after all. He was a fraud, and the only way Julian could redeem himself for the lies — for breaking the law every day of his life since he had submitted his application to the Academy at the age of seventeen, knowing full well what he was and and that  _creations_  like him were barred from the service — was by doing all he could to help others, to relieve suffering, and to keep from using his skills and his intellect for evil.

There was one curious bit of symmetry to all this, Julian reflected, waiting out another ripple of hideous pain down the back of his arm while on the far side of the room, Parvok sat up and rubbed his eyes. It was his experience on Ajilon Prime that had led him to choose the conference on Meezan IV out of a host of other options. He could have gone to the surgical summit on Vulcan, or the exobiology symposium on Andor, or even the annual General Medicine Colloquium on Earth. But he had chosen a burn treatment conference, because nothing had opened his eyes to the deficiencies in current protocols like suffering through the process on the other side of the biobed. If it had been so ghastly for Julian, with his greater endurance and all his unjust advantages, what must it be like for his patients? He had gone to Meezan IV eager to learn all he could, in the hopes of improving his own ability to treat such traumas, and perhaps even dreams of advancing the field. And it was from Meezan IV, a holiday destination and a pleasure-world with minimal security infrastructure, that the Dominion snatched him.

Looked at from that angle, Julian's current predicament and all that came with it could be seen as his atonement for his deceit in Ajilon Prime. He shifted a little, trying to ease the grinding misery in his shoulder. There was some justice to that.

"Parvok?" Julian whispered hoarsely. The Romulan was on his feet now, stretching his spine. He looked warily at the doctor, and then glanced around at the other prisoners. Martok had shifted his feet a couple of minutes ago, but he still seemed to be sleeping. Julian could not quite be sure, because it would have taken a contortion he didn't trust to his battered head in order to get a good look. He couldn't see Kalenna at all, but across the way, the Breen was motionless and Tain slept on.

Reluctantly but seeing no other option, Parvok approached. "The door is still sealed," he muttered quietly. "If you need to go out, you will have to wait."

"Not that," Julian rasped. His throat was burning, as much from the irritation of yesterday's hydrochloric acid rinse as from the tortured thirst that made his tongue feel thick. His lips were cracked, and not just where one of the Jem'Hadar's blows — Julian didn't even know which blow, or from which opponent — had split the lower one. "My water. I can't…"

He gestured with his right hand, its movement restricted by the need to lie upon that shoulder for support, indicating the left arm where it lay bound to his chest. Julian couldn't reach down to pick up his own bottle: he'd been unable to do so all night.

Parvok looked at the floor, where the canteens were tucked under the cot. He made a noise that might have been irritation or just grim acknowledgement, and crouched down to snag one. He shook it, and Julian heard the tantalizing slosh of perhaps three hundred millilitres. His desiccated salivary glands burned with longing, and it took all of his determination not to roll onto his back so he could take the bottle, which Parvok was holding just out of his reach.

"Do you need to sit up?" he asked uneasily. "You may spill it."

"I'll manage," Julian said with a tremendous effort. He couldn't take his eyes off the bottle. He was morbidly conscious of the burning in the small of his back, just to the left of his spine. "Please, just give it to me."

Parvok hesitated again. Just when Julian began to fear this was some kind of game — though why the Sub-Lieutenant should wish to toy with him he could not imagine — Parvok unscrewed the cap and lowered the vessel into the range of Julian's forearm.

It took some awkward manoeuvring, but he managed to tip it to his lips. The first touch of the water was rapturous, even though it stung in the laceration. One meagre mercy in the Dominion's senseless and spiteful lowering of the ambient temperature was that the water was deliciously cold. The chalky taste was muted, and the undertone of sulphur almost unidentifiable. Julian drank greedily, far more quickly than was strictly advisable. In under a minute, he had drained the bottle, spilling only a trickle out of the swollen right side of his mouth. When he was finished, he closed his eyes and sagged against the pillow, the canteen swaying from half-frozen fingers.

Parvok plucked it away before it could clatter to the floor. "Do you want the other one?" he asked.

"The other…" Julian parroted, uncomprehending. Then it came to him. He had passed so much of yesterday either foregoing water for the sake of the fights or unconscious with pain and concussion, or labouring over his diagnosis and what primitive treatment he could orchestrate. He had not had the opportunities to indulge his body's cravings for water, and while that was unwise given the state of his kidney, it did mean he had a full bottle yet untouched. A whole litre, and only a few hours left to make it last. He closed his eyes, cutting off the keen sight of the left and the somewhat more blurred perspective of the right, and tried to fight back the feeling of awed luxury because he knew he should not,  _should not_  be so overcome with so little cause.

It didn't matter. He was overcome. "Please," Julian said softly.

Parvok simply nodded. He retrieved the other bottle, opened it, and handed it off.

Julian only took a couple of sips this time. His stomach was beginning to churn and gurgle, and he did not want to court trouble. He curled his hand possessively around the canteen and held it to his chest. As the chill of it began to seep through his jumpsuit and the close-fitting shirt beneath, he reconsidered and manoeuvred it carefully towards the head of the cot so that he could rest his cheek against it. The initial contact was dizzyingly painful, nerve endings firing and disturbing the precarious equilibrium around the fractured bone. But then a blessed, frosted numbness began to settle over the inflamed area. It was well worth the ache that the cold sent into his knuckles.

Parvok watched as he settled, and then awkwardly placed the cap of the canteen on the cot near Julian's elbow. He backed away as if reluctant to depart without being dismissed. Julian didn't feel comfortable offering such a dismissal. He was used to a position of authority. Not many Starfleet lieutenants could boast of being a department head in a major interstellar port, but that was just what he was. He was accustomed to giving orders, and to managing the respect and expectations of subordinates. But he didn't know if Parvok saw him as a leader or a superior officer, or merely as an upstart human who had invaded the barracks and upset the status quo, and whose insufferable Federation optimism was being gradually and methodically beaten out of him as he so richly deserved.

Not that Julian believed he deserved that, exactly. No one deserved that, not even someone like him; to have hope slowly ground away, until there was nothing left but despair. Everyone had a right to hope: the oppressed Bajoran in a refugee camp, the untreated mentally ill man in a Sanctuary District, the exhausted Terran slave toiling in ore processing in the mirror universe, the prisoner turned defeated gladiator in a Dominion internment camp. Even a eugenic aberration had a right to hope. But possessing a right and seeing that right observed were two different things, weren't they? So he was beginning to learn, and there was a vast chasm of despair between.

Kalenna was stirring. Julian could hear her soft sigh as she came into awareness, probably remembering abruptly, as he did every time he woke to a fleeting moment of merciful forgetfulness, where she was and what that meant for the long Dominion Standard Day ahead. Then her cot was creaking, one rail thumping against the wall, as she sat up. A moment later, she stood over him, her grave expression softening a little as she took in the sight before her.

"You have your water," she said quietly. "I'm glad. I should have thought to leave it at your side last night. How are you feeling?"

He wished he had the wherewithal for a lie, or maybe a cheeky evasion. Instead, Julian only said; "It's better when I lie like this, even if I do usually prefer to sleep on my other side."

"I'm afraid you won't be able to do that for some time to come," Kalenna said solemnly. She glanced back over her shoulder. "The door isn't open yet. You still have time to rest."

It was the same information Parvok had fed him, but it sounded far less depressing coming from her. Parvok had cited a difficulty; Kalenna had cited an advantage. Julian thought that summed up the difference in their outlooks wonderfully well. It might even account for the disparity in their ranks, even though he suspected Parvok was a couple of decades the elder. He honestly didn't know if optimism was a trait valued by the Tal Shiar or the Romulan military, but he did know it had bearing on a Starfleet officer's evaluations. Any organization that relied upon its members' morale surely placed some sort of premium on hope.

There was that word again:  _hope_. It was almost like his brain was trying to tell him something.

Kalenna moved off. "General?" she said in a low, firm voice. A little louder, she repeated; "General Martok?" Then louder still; " _General_!"

The middle cot rattled, creaking ominously. Julian heard the clank of chaimail and the grunt of effort as Martok sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He wondered how the Klingon could endure to sleep on the bare webbing. Without the mattress now folded on the floor beneath, the pressure points where the supporting strips crossed had to be maddening. They were maddening enough even through the pallet. The one under his right twelfth rib was a particular trial for Julian just at present.

"What is it? Have you need of me?" the Klingon demanded, clearly ready for action.

"The door will open soon," said Kalenna. "After what happened a week ago, we all agreed: no one is to be left to sleep late."

Martok chuckled. "And will you be the one to wake Tain?" he asked. "It is our third morning in orbital night. He will not take well to the disturbance of his sleep."

Julian wished he could see both their faces. He thought Martok was teasing, but with Klingons it was sometimes hard to tell. As for Kalenna, he didn't know how she would take to being teased. If she were amused or annoyed, all would be well. But if she felt shame at the General's words, Julian had to intervene to ease that discomfort. There were miseries enough to spare without mocking one another. Best leave that to Tain, who couldn't be stopped.

"Don't tell me you're afraid to wake a napping Cardassian, General," Kalenna said equably, and Julian relaxed. She'd taken it as a joke. "Perhaps we should rouse him together: you grab his legs and I'll take the arms?"

Martok chuckled, and Julian was fascinated. This was a facet of their interaction with each other he had never observed before. It spoke to a camaraderie that was very uncommon between a Romulan and a Klingon. It had been forged, no doubt, in the fires of adversity. That they could turn it to laughter, even if only at Enabran Tain's expense, was extraordinarily heartening.

"Tain!" Martok bellowed, with sufficient vehemence that even the Breen turned their helmeted head towards him in what looked to Julian like slow surprise. "It is morning! Or what passes for morning in this place."

The Cardassian did not stir. Julian felt a tendril of unease snaking around his heart, which still felt bruised by the pain in his scapula. He knew that was a medical impossibility, but that didn't change the way it  _felt_.

"Tain!" Martok repeated, louder still. The inmates in the next barracks could probably hear him. "Awake and say something insufferable!"

Still, the Cardassian did not move. Kalenna shifted her weight from one foot to the other uneasily. Julian found himself squinting against the indifferent light, trying to discern the rise and fall of Enabran Tain's chest. It was a useless endeavour: the dim, uneven illumination, the tent of the dark blanket over the old man's bulk, and the fact that Julian was still concussed so that even his fully opened eye was not as sharp as usual, all meant he could not be certain. He thought he saw a ghost of motion, but that could have been the movement of blood through the vessels of his own head.

"Tain?" Kalenna said. It was a quiet call compared to Martok's, and unsteady with dread. She began to cross the room with slow, wary steps. She looked like a soldier inching into a known minefield, or a knight errant trying to creep into the den of a sleeping dragon. In contrast to the precision of her movements, her next utterance was sharp and undisciplined. " _TAIN_!"

The unmistakable fear in her voice drove home to Julian what it would mean, for her and for all of them, if Enabran Tain never awoke again. The transmitter was now wired into the power grid, but its programming was not complete. Tain still had to encode the message to be sent, and no one else among them had any idea how to do that — much less how to render it in the cipher that only Garak was supposed to be able to break. If Tain was dead, so was their plan of escape.

Julian still held out a fragile hope of rescue if his friends recognized the impostor, but he couldn't expect his cellmates to share it. And today was his tenth day in the camp; one day short of a fortnight by the Bajoran calendar. Any evidence of his abduction would have long since dissipated from the room on Meezan IV. Worse still, the longer the Changeling was on the station, the more adept it would get at blending in. If the crew of Deep Space Nine didn't notice something soon, who was to say they ever would?

"Tain!" roared Martok. He was on his feet now, looming just at the edge of Julian's truncated field of vision. "Wake up!"

Kalenna took the last two steps quickly, almost mincingly. She put out a hand before Tain's mouth and nose. Her shoulders sagged and her head drooped briefly in relief. "He's breathing," she sighed. She took hold of the Cardassian's shoulder and shook him. "Tain!"

He awoke with a snarl, gnashing his teeth at her. Kalenna withdrew her hand hastily, as if afraid he might bite it. In that first moment of disoriented rage, he certainly looked capable of it. At any other time, Julian might have been dismayed by this spectacle, and by the feral savagery in the ordinarily laughing, mocking eyes. But at present, he was simply so relieved by the proof of life and consciousness that he felt only mildly discomfited.

Kalenna was calm and cool in the wake of the threatening advance. She looked steadily down at Tain, who was now raking a slow hand through his grey hair. "The door will be opening soon," she said. "It's time to get ready for the count."

Tain's eyes were still wild and uncomprehending, but the contours of his face were settling back into their usual heavy configuration. He hissed distastefully and sat up, flinging off his blanket as he went. He massaged his chest as he rose, and when he was upright, he coughed. This was not his usual single, deliberate percussion, but three in a row: dry, harsh and forceful. The strain about his eyes eased marginally as the last rattle died to silence, but he was slumped heavily over the edge of the cot.

Julian saw the need for immediate action, but was incapable of taking it without aid — a strange predicament for a man accustomed to being able to charge in whenever he was needed. "Help me sit up, quickly, please," he said, gathering up his bottle and holding it aloft so that it was the first thing Kalenna took. She set it squarely in the middle of the closest bench, and bent to aid him, drawing back his blanket first.

It had seemed like a woefully inadequate covering while he shivered beneath it, but the sudden draft that swept up his body as it was withdrawn told Julian the blanket had been lending him some warmth after all, however sparse. He swung his legs over the edge of the unstable bunk while Kalenna got her arms under his good shoulder and levered him up. He had to rest a moment then, sucking in shallow breaths that made his ribs ache and beating back the advancing edge of black dizziness. His stomach churned again, and he didn't know if that was a sign of resurgent concussed nausea, or only his wretched hunger.

It seemed like an eternity since he had last awakened feeling pleasantly peckish instead of maddeningly ravenous. In that moment, Julian thought he might have passed up five minutes with an osteogenic stimulator if he'd been offered the choice between the tool and a plate of hot buttered scones.

Martok had come around to his other side, and between the two of them, the Major and the General hoisted Julian to his feet. He couldn't say it had been done with a minimum of discomfort, because the flare of disparate agonies stole his breath and eclipsed his vision. But they were as gentle as possible under the circumstances, and at least he forgot about food for a minute or two.

"Sub-Lieutenant, make the beds," Kalenna instructed crisply as she helped Julian shuffle across the room. He had to extricate his right arm from her support, but she stayed very near as he reached out for Enabran Tain.

The elderly Cardassian bared his teeth as Julian's fingers drew near. The wild look was still black in his eyes, and he looked more reptilian than ever. But Julian was firmly in his professional mindset now, not about to be off-put by a little show of hostility. "I just need to check your pulse," he explained calmly. I'm going to put my hand on your temple.

He landmarked with his fingertips in Tain's oily hair. His skin was clammy and dismayingly cold. The pulse was fierce but wandering. Julian leaned in, watching the tracking of the Cardassian's eyes and wishing he had a tricorder. Hell, he would have been overcome with gratitude if someone had handed him a steel-and-latex stethoscope.

"I need to examine you," he said to Tain. "I'm sorry to suggest it when you can't have privacy, but there's not much time between the release of the doors and the call to the count. Can you stand? I'll need you sitting on one of the tables, and we have to get your tunic off."

Tain's eyes narrowed in chilly loathing. "It can wait," he hissed. "After the count, when there is more time."

"It most certainly cannot wait," Julian said firmly, in the no-nonsense tone that could subdue even Major Kira when she was in rebellious patient mode. "You've got an arrhythmia, and the coughing wasn't enough to correct it this time. I need to listen to what's going on in your chest, and we don't have any time to waste. If you don't feel able to walk to the bench—"

Tain made a swatting gesture of irritation, scoffing dismissively. "Of course I can walk!" he snapped. He shifted his bulk forward onto the rail of the cot. Julian stepped back to give him room to navigate, and with a stentorian grunt, Tain hauled himself to his feet. He staggered as he took his first step, looking uncannily like a drunken Chief O'Brien swaggering home from Quark's after last orders. Then he righted himself and rounded Julian, sitting down heavily on the edge of the bench.

Kalenna snatched up Julian's bottle of water before the Cardassian could knock it over as he leaned back, bracing himself on his knees and wriggling in an attempt to get comfortable. The movement brought both of his feet up off the ground in a fashion that Julian found peculiarly reassuring. Most patients' legs dangled like that when they sat on the edge of a biobed, after all: it was the comfort of the familiar.

"If you want help with your clothes…" he began, falling silent when Tain shot him a scathing glare that the others could not see. The old man slid his arms out of the sleeves of his flocked jacket, and then groped for the hooks that closed the right shoulder of his tunic.

Martok had moved off to the far side of the room, and was leaning with studied nonchalance against the doorpost, staring out the window in fascination. Parvok was busy restoring order to the cots: Kalenna's was done, and he now laid the mattress back on Martok's. The Breen was sitting up now, their back against the wall. Julian hadn't even noticed them move.

The Major positioned herself squarely behind Enabran Tain, the table between them. She was looking carefully away as the Cardassian hoisted his tunic over his head and Julian used his one functioning arm to assist him. It was obvious, however, that she wanted to remain near at hand in case her aid were needed. Julian was grateful for both the discretion and the consideration. He wasn't very stable on his feet, and if, God forbid, Tain collapsed, Julian would be useless to arrest his fall.

The tunic was on the floor now, and Tain trying to writhe out of his third layer: a warm, ribbed shirt that had once been a greenish mustard hue. It was darkened to grimy greyish-brown in most places, and large, spreading holes gaped in the sleeves where Tain's elbows had worn through. It was a ragged and disreputable-looking garment now, and apparently the last: when Tain hoisted it over his heavy head, he bared his torso to the bitterly cold room.

Julian spared a moment to look for any gross abnormalities. He took in the sight of the the still-prominent belly that nonetheless showed loose folds of skin where the flesh had been whittled away by long deprivation, the shadows of hard muscle still underlying the softness of age and indulgence; the broad barrel of the ribcage; the sternal teardrop of cartilage that was the echo of the one on the Cardassian's glabella. Julian noted the dry, flaking quality of the scales along Tain's clavicles and, as he moved to the side to look behind his patient, down his spinal column. He wondered if that was owed to the lack of environmental humidity, or the irritation of old, unwashed garments, or some nutritional deficiency. For all he knew, it could be a normal skin texture variation. His only benchmark for a close examination of Cardassian skin was Garak's, and he had only seen the tailor without his shirt once, during the hurried transition from daily garments to hospital gown three years ago.

"I need to listen to your heart," Julian said, with more confidence than he felt. The manoeuvre required would have been easy yesterday morning. Now, there didn't seem any way to execute it easily, or even without considerable personal cost.

"Do what you must," Tain huffed. He was scrubbing at his breastbone again, his eyes unsettlingly vacant.

"I…" Julian hesitated, his confidence failing him for a moment as he was forced to think of himself as a casualty instead of a doctor. "I'm going to need to hold onto you while I do it. To… to keep my balance."

Tain's eyes sparkled malevolently — an encouraging sign, diagnostically speaking, but profoundly disturbing to witness. "Is that an admission of weakness, Doctor? To  _me_?"

"I can't press my right ear to your chest, and I can't brace myself on the table with my left hand," said Julian. "Call it a weakness if you must, but I need some means of support."

"Very well, then," Tain huffed. "Grab me however you like. I just don't think it's very professional, that's all: using patients as scaffolding."

The words stung, and the fact that Julian knew they were meant to do so didn't make them any easier to take.

"This would have been easier three days ago, the first time I asked you to let me examine you," he said sourly.

"Hindsight is faultless, Doctor," Tain said with an oratorial drawl. "Just do the best you can, and I'll try to forgive your shortcomings."

It wasn't a matter of Julian's shortcomings. It was a matter of how much pain he could endure contorting himself into the necessary position to listen. He took a firm hold on Tain's left shoulder and lowered himself as steadily as he could. The fire awakened in his ribs and abdomen as he bent at the waist was consumed almost immediately by an inferno of breath-stealing agony as the weight of his left arm shifted, straining the fractured scapula. Julian's body went rigid, and he knew he was clinging too tightly to Tain, but for an awful moment he could not help himself.

Then either the pain receded fractionally, or he got a grip on his mind again. He eased the rest of the way down, and then had to endure a lighting bolt into his skull and a surge of lightheadedness as he turned his face to his right shoulder and eased his left ear against Enabran Tain's ribs. He fought to control his ragged breathing, to quiet his own body so he could listen to his patient's.

"Such a performance!" Tain mocked cheerily. It appeared Julian's wretched condition was a welcome distraction from his own. "Anyone would think you'd been trampled by a herd of Algorian mammoths instead of knocked around a bit by a posturing Jem'Hadar."

Julian was still trying to get a grip on himself. It was difficult to breathe at all in this position, between the pain and the dizzying angle of his concussed skull and the effort of straining against his bruised ribs. The smell wasn't conducive to easy airflow, either. Tain's skin reeked of stale perspiration and dead skin, and Julian finally placed the elusive scent of the accumulated Cardassian musk. It resembled nothing quite so much in all the Galaxy as the salty, murky tang of the Thames embankment at low tide.

Martok was speaking. The words rumbled ominously across the room. "—enough of that from you, Tain! The Doctor made a sacrifice none of us could have made, and he bought you the time to do your tinkering. Mock his courage further at your peril."

"Oh, I didn't mean to  _offend_!" Tain drawled, sarcastically unctuous. "He performed his task adequately, though from the sound of things he cut it awfully close—"

"Be quiet!" Julian said sharply, his clinical patience snapping. Trying to restrain his pain-fuelled irritation, he made an effort to explain. "I can't hear your heart if your whole chest is rumbling with the oratory."

"Hmph!" said Tain indignantly, but then he fell silent.

Julian listened, closing his good eye and letting the swollen one give up the mammoth effort to keep up its slit of eyelash-obscured vision. He sketched out the electrocardiogram waves in his imagination as he listened, visualizing them as they would have appeared on a tricorder screen or a biobed monitor. He could hear the abnormalities in the rhythm and the pace. He had spent terrible, interminable hours watching Garak's monitors, after all, while the tailor slept through the brutal withdrawal from the Obsidian Order's monstrous endorphin implant. He knew a normal Cardassian heartbeat, and he knew one made ragged with the strain of unremitting anguish. This one was far worse.

"The average Cardassian's resting heartbeat is between twenty and forty beats per minute," he said at last, when he finally moved his head a few centimetres lower so he could listen to Tain's lungs. Now, speech would be welcome so he could hear the natural breathing pattern. "What's yours?"

"Why would I know a thing like that?" asked Tain.

"What was it when you last had an appointment with your own doctor?" Julian pressed instead. "Two years ago, I'm assuming, give or take?"

There was a crackle and gurgle of fluid deep in the lungs. Not much, not yet, but it was worrying.

"I had a full physical before assembling the joint fleet," Tain admitted uncomfortably. He shifted as Julian tightened his hold on the fleshy shoulder so that he could move to the other lung. "It seemed a sensible precaution. But who has use for a doctor's numbers and details? That kind of minutiae is beneath my notice."

Julian didn't rise to the barb. "Did you see the screen when he was taking your vitals? I thought Cardassians were known for their photographic memory — or is that just propaganda?"

He had pricked the man's pride, and Tain puffed out his chest. This put a sudden pressure on Julian's neck, minor in other circumstances, but in these just enough to make his head reel again. He screwed his eyes closed and fought to breathe through it.

"Fifty-eight beats per minute," said Tain. "Blood pressure point two-three-seven over point one-six-two."

So he hadn't been in peak physical condition even then. Julian frowned at the unfamiliar blood pressure numbers, curiosity and deduction overcoming physical discomfort. "What unit of pressure?" he asked.

"Atmospheres, of course," said Tain dismissively. "How else would you measure it?"

Now that Julian paused to think of it, millimetres of mercury was an absurd and outmoded unit that only survived in this lone context because measuring blood pressure in pascals produced frighteningly high numbers. Tell a patient his blood pressure was one-thirty-five over eighty, and he was pleased. Tell him it was 17,999 over 10,666, and he was bound to worry. Higher order units necessitated the use of decimal places for clinically useful accuracy. That was not always the most accessible option, either, depending on a patient's education.

But a Cardassian unit of atmospheric pressure was virtually the same as one on Earth, and that meant Tain had been suffering from serious hypertension even two years ago. Julian ran the calculation almost as an afterthought. After so many months in this place, without monitoring or medication or even adequate nutrition, it was unlikely that the situation was much improved, even accounting for the weight loss. Julian shuddered to think of the wear and tear on Tain's blood vessels after such a prolonged period of untreated strain.

"Take a deep breath," he said. "Hold it. And… release."

There was  _definitely_  fluid in his lungs.

The door panel beeped, and a moment later the pneumatic works screeched and clanged as Martok unsealed the barracks. "We will see you for the count?" he asked, casting the question back towards Julian. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice. "If you require assistance walking…"

"I'll manage," Julian promised. "Everyone go, please. I think… I think a little privacy would be wise."

They went. He heard the Breen's cot creak, and when the door slammed closed, he knew he and his patient were alone. Julian straightened up painfully, clinging to Tain's shoulder for support. He couldn't let go even when he was upright. His knees felt filled with gelatin and his back was quaking. He fixed a steady, solemn gaze on Tain.

"You're bradycardic," he said. "Your heart is beating too slowly. I don't know if that's part of your general condition, or if it's purely a result of the cold, but I do know the temperatures in this place aren't helping matters. Because your heart is beating so slowly, you're not getting enough oxygen to your extremities, and the blood isn't leaving your lungs quickly enough. I can hear some fluid. Your left ventricle is also emptying too early, which means it's not filled to capacity when it pumps the blood to your body."

"You don't need to speak to me like I'm an old woman, Doctor!" Tain groused. "I don't need it broken to me gently. What's the prognosis?"

There was more. Julian had heard a marked prolongation of the QT interval of the heartbeat. Untreated, this could degenerate into life-threatening problems, particularly under stress. The cold-induced (or aggravated: he couldn't rule out an underlying problem unless he could warm his patient) bradycardia might reduce that risk. Or it might be a symptom of other strains on the heart that Julian couldn't diagnose by ear alone. But what was the point of telling Tain the grim details, when there was nothing either of them could do to correct the problem?

"It's not good," he said instead. "Your heart rhythm is irregular on top of everything else, and that could become dangerous very quickly. Your whole circulatory system is under stress. With the proper medications, I could get your heart back to normal function over the course of a couple of days. With access to an operating room, I could perform a series of surgical procedures to put everything right in three hours. But here…"

He cast bleak eyes around the barren room, trying not to feel the black hole opening up under his ribs, sucking in his knowledge and his determination and his hope and leaving him with nothing. The senseless helplessness of his situation was appalling, and Julian had to fight off an icy eddy of despair.

"One thing I do advise is that you spend as much time inside the wall as you're able," he said, forcing himself to focus on the medicine. "It's warmer in there: that should help with the bradycardia, at least. When you're not working, you can sit in the crawlspace with a blanket or two. We'll see if that makes any improvement."

He considered his next words carefully, his calm, clinical demeanour concealing the mad scramble in his brain for something, anything at all that he could do for this patient besides offer this panacea of all platitudes. There was nothing.

"You need to stay hydrated, and to rest frequently," he said. "I'll keep monitoring your pulse and your lungs, and we'll see if things improve. There's not a great deal I can do for you, Enabran: not without equipment and medication."

Lectrazine, he thought wistfully, with the same desperate yearning with which he had dreamed of food after missing a daily meal. Metrazene. Even archaic standards like nitroglycerin and digitalis. A diuretic for the lungs, antihypertensives, he was even desperate enough to try a low-dose anticholinergic just to speed up the heart a little. A pacemaker implant the size of a child's smallest fingernail. Laser ablation to improve flow through the cardiac arteries. A world of miraculous cures that had been at his fingertips his whole career, and were now suddenly as unobtainable as stardust.

Tain grunted gruffly. "Well, at least you're honest about it," he said, shrugging Julian's hand off his shoulder so that he could bend down and snag his shirt from the pile on the floor.

Bereft of his one support, Julian swayed perilously. He bent over the bench, clutching its edge to steady himself as he tried to make his legs support him. His head was throbbing and his throat burned. Pinions of blackness danced before his eyes.

"Please, could you call the others back?" Julian whispered. His voice was very small and tremulous. He didn't have the strength to modulate it.

"I'll lend you an arm," Tain said impatiently. "But you've got to give me your assurances that all of this stays between you and me. You owe me, Doctor, and I'm calling in another favour. The others don't get to know what you told me today. Understood? It would undermine the operation."

Julian wouldn't have betrayed a medical confidence in any case. He didn't need to be strong-armed into keeping his own counsel. But he couldn't say any of this. He twisted himself around, sinking down onto the bench before he could fall to the floor. He curled forward over his restrained left arm and his quaking thighs, wrapping his forearm around both knees and lowering his head as far as he could. The shifting of the fluid in his right sinuses and the blood in his brain was grotesquely disorienting, like a sudden shift in orientation during a nightmare. He fought to stay conscious.

Tain was on his feet now, still rearranging his garments. Julian knew that distantly, a message from fading senses that didn't really care to take more careful note of what was going on beside him. "We ought to get going," the falsely cheerful voice said. "Can't be very long before they sound the alarm, and by then it's already too late to get a good spot in the line. Wouldn't do to have you in the front row today, I think. Not in the state you're in. Really, Doctor, you could have tried a  _little_  harder not to inconvenience all of us like this, you know… oh. Dear me. Feeling faint, are we?"

Julian couldn't answer. His words would have been drowned out anyway, for just at that moment the klaxon bleated out its deafening blasts. The noise scrambled the pulsing, aching jelly between his ears, and he felt sure he would vomit. Tain was already seizing him by the right arm. The count bent for nothing, not even medical necessity.

_(fade)_

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**osteogenic stimulator (tech.):** a device to stimulate the rapid regeneration of bone. (Ep. 3.18, "Distant Voices")

 **sternal teardrop (exo.):** an external feature in the middle of some Cardassian's chests, similar to the "spoon" on their foreheads. (visible on Dr. Natima Lang in Ep. 2.18, "Profit and Loss")

 **glabella:**  the area between the eyebrows and above the nose.

 **electrocardiogram:** a means of charting heart rhythm.

 **millimetres of mercury (mmHg):** the standard unit of measure for human blood pressure.

 **bradicardia:**  dangerously slow heart rate.

 **prolonged QT interval:**  a particular arrhythmia of the heart that can degenerate into potentially fatal heart problems.

 **lectrazine (pharm.):** a 24th Century medication used for cardiac stabilization, among other things. (VOY Ep. 3.07, "Sacred Ground")

 **metrazene:** a 24th Century medication used to treat cardia arrhythmias. (TNG Ep. 4.23, "The Host")

 **laser ablation (tech.):** removal of blockages or unnatural growths by means of laser surgery, used by the 24th Century to relieve atherosclerosis (blocked arteries).


	33. Setting an Example

**Part VI, Act IV: Setting an Example**

Somehow, Julian's feet managed to carry him, stumbling after Enabran Tain. His head was still swimming and the pain of trying to keep pace with the Cardassian who was dragging him, propelling him through the suddenly silent door and down to the edge of the corridor and out into the vaulted hollow of the atrium. The prisoners were scrambling into their customary lines, but Julian couldn't hear them any more than he had heard the door: his ears were filled with blank, white noise and his vision was frighteningly blurred.

He did hear Tain, though, as the old man tugged him down towards the middle of the line and shoved aside two armoured Cardassians who had claimed prime places in the back row. "Get up to the front," Tain commanded coldly. " _Now."_

One of the Cardassian's turned on him, snarling. "I don't think so!" he snapped. Then he saw who had manhandled him, and he hesitated.

Tain smiled, slowly and noxiously. "Yarek Pirn," he said with relish. "You've been with the Order for seven years, haven't you? Wife and children in Lakarian City.  _Twins_ , I believe."

Julian was struggling to keep his feet, fighting off his body's need to simply crumple to the floor, but he was not so far gone that he could not see the sudden, pallid terror in the younger Cardassian's eye. The other man selected was already nudging his way into the front row. Yarek Pirn stepped back.

"I meant no disrespect," he said stiffly, giving up his place.

Julian wanted to ask him what he imagined Enabran Tain could possibly do to his family back home on Cardassia Prime. He wanted to ask Tain much the same question. But even if it hadn't been so imprudent, it would have been impossible. He couldn't master his feet, let alone his tongue, and he let Tain tug him roughly into place. Julian felt a hard shoe against the back of his boots, knocking his feet into position. An hand closed in the small of his back, grabbing a fistful of his uniform to hold him upright.

"Straighten your shoulders and pick up your head," Tain hissed. "There's only so much I can do to help you, Doctor. If you hope to live through the count, you have to want it."

Julian did want it. Or at least, he didn't want to die beaten to a jelly by the Jem'Hadar on some forsaken asteroid. He swallowed the churning nausea swirling high in his chest, and closed his eyes against the whirling blur of the world around him, and fought the pull of the pain.

The rush of blood in his left ear, at least, had abated somewhat. He could hear the distant, crisply disinterested voice of the Vorta: "Two. Four. Six."

He was trembling violently, trying desperately not to give into the tremors. Julian forced himself to take slow, steady breaths. They couldn't be deep, because that caused too much movement of the ribcage — which was not only a problem because of the extensive intercostal bruising, but because it shifted the scaffold of support under his broken shoulder blade. He curled the fingers of his left hand into a desperate half-fist, tugging on the sturdy side seam of his jumpsuit. It was a tactile distraction, and it gave him a comforting illusion of holding onto something for support. He had to keep his right arm by his side in at least an approximation of the stiff, military stance expected of the prisoners.

Tain's hand was still against his spine, and Julian was grateful but puzzled. What did it matter to the old spymaster if he took a beating, even to death? He'd already told him everything he had asked about Starfleet's listening posts. He'd done his part distracting the Vorta. He would be useless for similar ends for weeks, perhaps months. He had already confessed how little help he could be medically. Tain had no further use for him. And yet here he was, running the risk of censure himself just to help Julian stand. It didn't make sense.

Deyos had restarted the count. Julian didn't know what the excuse had been this time, but he was almost certain he knew the real reason. The Vorta had to know he would be struggling to stay upright today. It was a battle of attrition.

He tried to concentrate on his vital signs. He didn't have the strength to alter them, not in his present condition, but contemplating them at least provided him with a target for his consciousness. His pulse was elevated, his respirations more frequent than usual. But his blood pressure was running on the low side, and Julian wondered again about the state of his kidney. Just thinking about it, even in passing, made his flank burn miserably. Maybe it was best to focus on something other than his body after all.

But he couldn't look very far beyond it. His senses — sight and hearing, anyway — seemed somehow muted, muffled. The far line of prisoners was blurry, the Vorta's voice was faint, and even the people directly surrounding Julian seemed more like apparitions than life forms. He swayed again, dangerously, and felt Tain's other hand close on his right elbow, pulling him close. They were shoulder to shoulder now, and Julian couldn't help but lean into the support. He tried to tell himself he shouldn't, and to remind himself that Tain wasn't exactly well this morning, either. But he needed some sort of help to keep his feet, and he did not dare to lean to the left. Even if he'd had one of his cellmates on that side instead of an unidentifiable Romulan male, Julian's left arm could never have borne the strain of holding him.

For a while, he actually drifted away from thought and general awareness of his surroundings, subsisting in a fog of pain and delicately balanced physical strains, all near but not quite at the tipping point: nausea, dizziness, exhaustion, and breathlessness. There was something about the haze that was almost restful, but groping after the reasons why that should be would have upset the exquisitely equalized load. Julian simply floated in indistinct awareness until it came to him. Without the constant barrage of thought, there was no guilt, either, and no self-hatred. He wondered why he hadn't noticed how exhausting it could be.

He didn't know how long he had been standing there, nor how many times the Vorta had decided to wend his way back to the head of the line and begin again. But Julian was conscious that his shoulders were sagging and his head hanging heavily when Tain's fist suddenly released its hold on his uniform. The Cardassian did not pull away immediately, but he jostled Julian surreptitiously.

"You've got to stand on your own, Doctor," he hissed. "They're turning."

Julian tried to muster some clarity of thought, but he couldn't. When Tain's support was withdrawn, the elderly man taking a half-step to the side to create a gap between them, Julian tottered dangerously. It was as if he had forgotten how to hold himself upright. The muscles of his abdomen clenched, and he had to shift his right foot to counterbalance his tipping head. The sudden tensing of his body, not unlike the impact sensation at the tail end of a myoclonic jerk, awoke the inferno in his shoulder-blade and sent a hard dagger of pain through his skull.

He meant to remain silent, but he could not help a sharp, hasty gasp that burned in his throat and jolted into his sore chest. The prisoner before him stiffened and glanced back. Julian caught a fleeting impression of a glaring eye before the other man snapped back to attention. He was unable to attempt any such thing himself. All that he could manage was to stand as still as he could and hope that he was straight enough to escape a reprimand. He wasn't delusional enough to hope he might escape notice.

"Two hundred twelve, two hundred fourteen," said Deyos. His voice was very near now, and Julian supposed his was the offset silhouette beyond two rigid shoulders, just to the left. "You, Cardassian, step to the end of the line."

The prisoner obeyed, rapidly but with an attempt at military discipline. It was just like the morning when Trel had been pulled from the line, and Julian knew what would come next even before the Vorta spoke again.

"Step forward, human," he said with cool contempt.

Julian could not. In his hazy state, he wasn't even quite certain how his legs worked, and if he tried to move them without the proper understanding of their function, he knew that he was going to fall. It would be like trying to readjust an antigrav gantry without reading the instructions.

Deyos waited for an impossibly long moment, during which Julian's vacant brain somehow managed to drum up half a dozen possible scenarios all terminating in an identical outcome. He was going to die.

At least he'd bought Tain the time he needed. If the others were rescued, surely Kalenna would see to it that word of his replacement got promptly to Starfleet. He hoped she would, at least. He wished he had thought to ask it of her last night. It would have been a comfort, meagre but essential, to have that assurance.

"Very well," Deyos said with hideously false regret. "Guards, pull him from the line if he refuses to cooperate."

Two massive shadows, their facial features a seamless blur, lunged forward and seized Julian by the arms. They pulled in perfect tandem, but all he could feel was the supernova of anguish in his back and chest and shoulder on the left. He found he did know how to use his feet after all, after a fashion. He staggered frantically forward, trying to catch up because it seemed the only way to arrest the pull on his fractured scapula.

He slammed to a stop almost at once, for the Jem'Hadar held him back just short of Deyos. Julian's knees buckled at this fresh outrage on his arm, and that, of course, made the pain still worse. He clenched his jaw reflexively, trying to bite off a cry, and danced perilously near oblivion as this woke a fresh eruption in his face. He must have made some sort of sound, because the Vorta chuckled soullessly.

"Now, Doctor, you make us seem cruel," he sneered. "All I ask is that you do as you're told. And that you stand up straight for the count — it's a matter of respect, you see. Is that  _really_  too much to expect?"

Julian couldn't answer. He doubted there was anything he could have said to improve his situation, anyhow. At least this way he was spared the temptation to humiliate himself by trying to please the Vorta.

Deyos sighed melodramatically. "Straighten him up," he instructed.

They heaved on his arms again, and Julian sucked in a thin stream of searingly cold air as an inoculant against unconsciousness. He wanted to keep himself aware as long as he could. He hadn't made peace with himself yet. He needed to try, but he couldn't think.

"The Second does excellent work," Deyos reflected. "He is to be commended, First."

"I will see it is done," Ikat'ika said. He must have been nearby, because Julian could hear his stern voice very clearly, even though his field of vision was now the blur from the brush of a very depressed Impressionist.

 _That was funny,_ a wounded voice within him chided.  _You didn't even smile. That was funny!_

Was it, though? Besides, smiling was far too painful. Julian preferred to save his allotment of painful acts for matters like breathing.

"We must set an example, First," Deyos said. "We cannot have prisoners refusing direct orders and slouching during the count, can we?"

"No, Vorta," said Ikat'ika.

"Then what are you waiting for? Set an example."

Julian had heard those words before, uttered by a familiar voice rendered grotesque with uncharacteristic cruelty and hate. For an awful moment he was transported to a shadowy barroom, faced with the wrath of the Intendant in her richly-textured gown.  _You want to set an example, Garak? Use him. Set an example._

He had expected to die then, too. And his death on the Promenade in the alternate universe would surely have been far more lingering that the one that awaited him now. The Jem'Hadar were ruthlessly efficient killers. Even a lethal beating at their hands would not last long. It was even possible they would simply use the plasma rifles and vaporize him where he stood.

Julian thought he was prepared for the blow when it came. He wasn't. An iron fist blasted into his abdomen. He thought maybe the First had been hoping to hit him where Verat'elar had landed the most effective blow Julian had suffered in his first match. But his left arm was secured snugly across his diaphragm and it sheltered his celiac plexus. Ikat'ika struck him just above the umbilicus instead, and with enough force to drive the air from Julian's lungs.

His body wanted to curl forward, doubling over the point of impact as new, urgent pain reverberated into his intestines. But the Jem'Hadar held his arms fast and refused to let him bend even a little. Julian choked in a new lungful of air, knowing he was fortunate that he could do so but unable to really appreciate the gift. Another arm swung, dealing him a brutal backhand across the jaw. Julian's head snapped to the right, and his jaw collided with his clavicle.

His head felt like it had been struck with a quantum torpedo. His knees gave out, and he hung between the two Jem'Hadar, powerless to prevent the strain on his shoulder-blade, or the attendant torment boring through his heart. He felt the next two blows, fists pummelling his abdomen again, by their force alone. There was no more room in his mind for such distant pain.

He felt the vises release their hold on his arms. He felt himself falling, falling, falling. Felt himself crash to the floor. He heard the dull  _clunk_  of his forehead slamming into the stone, and by some miracle of physics or instinct he managed to make himself tip to the right, not the left, so that it was his unaffected shoulder that hit the ground. He was trying to curl himself into a ball, to protect his soft abdomen and his pelvis and his face. But he couldn't do anything to guard his back, and it was there that most of the worst injuries lay.

A boot blasted into his shin, and another clipped the back of his left thigh. Then one found the spot just above the fiddlehead of his spine where the worst of the flank bruising lay. Julian thought he felt something tear inside of him, and then he knew no more.

_(fade)_

Something cold and moist touched his lips, and Julian's tongue quested for it. Comprehension was an unattainable thing, but he knew his thirst. He sucked greedily at the thing, which tasted faintly of metal. A small quantity of water dribbled into his mouth, and he tried to suck more vigorously. But the cold thing was pulled away, and Julian thought his heart would break. He needed water, much more water than that. Who could be so spiteful as to take it away?

But a moment later it was back, freshly sodden. He sucked at it again, and again got a couple of millilitres of water for his pains. The cold thing passed lightly over his lips, wetting them and stinging in the cracks. Then it was gone again and he was sure it would be gone forever. When it came back, Julian wanted to weep with gratitude. He was so unbearably thirsty. His whole pain-riddled body was crying out for water. He sucked, and once more when the source of the fluid was withdrawn, he was convinced he had lost it for good.

There was a phrase to describe the faculty that was failing him. He wanted to remember it. He had to remember it. Nothing terrified him more than that feeling he had once known something that was now lost to him. Being unable to remember something he used to know was worse than being uncomprehending from the start.

It was worse even than the look of disappointment in his mother's eyes when she tapped the pointy shape with the bar across it with her finger again, and again he couldn't remember what she'd called it yesterday. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry he'd forgotten, sorry that he could never remember, but the shapes all looked the same to him and their names didn't mean anything. He liked it when she sang the names, but she'd stopped doing that a long time ago because he never sang along the right way. That made him feel sad and ashamed, but it wasn't as terrible as this.

 _Object permanence_ , his brain supplied as the damp thing returned and he was able to extract a little more water from it. _Knowing that a thing still exists even when you can't see it or touch it is "object permanence". It's developed in human infants between the ages of four and eight months. Get a grip on yourself, Bashir. Whatever that thing is, it's coming back in a moment. You just need to be patient_.

Easy for that voice to say. The voices inside his head didn't need water: only the external voice relied on it. The external voice, and every throbbing cell in his miserable body. The moist thing touched his lips again, and Julian sucked at hit.

"It's going to take you hours to rehydrate him like that," a scornful voice said. "Where did you get such a ridiculous idea in the first place?"

"It's working, isn't it? He's responding." Julian recognized that voice and thought of it fondly. The name was lost in the jumble of things he was supposed to know but couldn't call to mind. This time, though, he repressed the panic. Object permanence, after all. The memories were still there, even if he couldn't touch them right at this moment. "And I'm hardly going to tell  _you_  my life's story, am I, Tain?"

The first voice chuckled. "You've got a sharp tongue all of a sudden, Major. Have I displeased you in some way?"

"My tongue has always been sharp," said the woman. "If you haven't noticed that until now, maybe your much-vaunted powers of observation have been exaggerated."

The one called Tain clicked his tongue reproachfully. "Now, Major. If anything, I  _downplay_  my abilities. In my line of work, it doesn't do to seem as powerful as one is, much less more so. His adversary's capacity for underestimation is a man's greatest weapon."

The moist thing was back again, and Julian eagerly sucked in its meagre moisture. The method might be working, but it was tortuously slow. He had to let the woman, the Major — Major Kira? No, definitely not… — know that he was awake, so they could find some more expedient means of easing his thirst. Julian tried to open his eyes, but they felt heavy as sandbags. He tried to move his body against the rigid, uncomfortable surface that sagged strangely beneath him, but he was wary of the pain.

He was too hot, almost unbearably so. He could feel perspiration trickling across his back, and he understood he was lying on his side. He always preferred to sleep on his side, so that wasn't surprising, but he knew there should be more to all of this. His lips were touched again, and he drank, if it could be called drinking.

"Such a fragile machine, the human body," the one called Tain mused. "With those injuries, a  _Cardassian_  would still be up on his feet, making himself useful. Why, the General, here, would be thundering around the barracks, announcing he was ready to fight again."

A new voice, rumbling and raspy, cut through the air. "Go out for a walk or get into the wall, Tain. We have had enough of your mockery. There is nothing to crow about here."

"I'm not crowing," Tain said innocently. "I'm  _concerned_. I don't want the young man to die any more than you two do. He made a spirited effort, today as well as yesterday. And I'm not finished with him yet."

There was a rapid rush of movement very near at had: Julian felt the breeze of it on his face, and it offered a moment's piteous relief from the plasma fire in his blood. He heard a sharp  _crack_  somewhere above.

"Leave him alone!" the woman snapped. "He's earned some respite from your machinations. Now get into the wall and be about your business! You're wasting time for all of us."

Tain laughed ruefully, but there was a circumspect undertone to his voice when he said; "Of course I'm happy to get back to work, Major. But you'd best think twice before you try that again. I won't be as amiable next time."

Julian heard her crouch down beside him again, and somewhere off in the distance there was a dull, metallic  _thump_. The wetness was touching his lips again, and he wanted to drink, but he was so very, very tired. He slept instead.

 _(fade_ )

He awoke shivering violently with cold. His eyes opened almost of their own volition this time, as if they could find the source of his misery. They settled on General Martok instead, sitting on the nearest table and watching him soberly. As soon as he saw that Julian was awake, the warrior rose stiffly to his feet and drew near.

"Doctor," he said, dropping into a half-crouch with his right biceps femoris on his heel and his left knee on the floor. He laid a heavy hand on Julian's shoulder, where several layers of bedding covered him. "You are cold," he observed.

"F-freezing," Julian rasped. His throat was dry. He closed his eyes briefly, exhausted from the effort of speaking. He heard Martok's low grunt of effort as he stood, and he wanted to call the Klingon back. He was gripped with an irrational terror and he didn't want to be left alone.

Then Martok was back, and he was draping something over Julian's body, folding over the back edge and tucking it close behind him. Another blanket. Julian's eyes quested for the older man's face, and Martok gave him the thinnest ghost of a grim smile.

"Tain will object, no doubt, when he comes out of the wall," he said; "but your need is greater than his, and there is no sense in the blanket lying unused while he works."

Julian remembered that he had told Tain to wrap up warmly when he rested in the crawlspace. But a blanket would be more of a hindrance than a help within the circuit housing proper — and in any case, he was too unbearably cold to argue. He subsisted in painful tremors for a while before he could muster the strength to speak again.

"Is there… have I any water left?" he asked, dreading the answer.

Martok nodded solemnly. "You had a little left from yesterday," he said. "You were in no fit state to muster to ration call, but we have made up the deficit jointly. We will not permit you to go thirsty."

He knelt again and reached under the bunk. A moment later, he was unscrewing the cap of a canteen. "Do you wish to sit up?" he asked. "It would not be wise to spill."

Julian agreed with that sentiment, but he didn't know if he could rise, even with help. His left arm was afire again, from his spine to well below the elbow. And there was a sick, pulverized ache in that flank that worried him. He thought he remembered… but that was lost in the fog of the count, and he was mistaken.

"I can manage down here," he whispered. "If you'll… help me?"

"Of course," said Martok. He slid his left hand under Julian's head, supporting neck and jaw as he lifted him a few centimetres off of the lumpy little pillow. There were a few warning fissures of pain that shot up into Julian's broken cheekbone, but nothing he could not endure.

"You elbow," he said instead, a self-effacing protest and a doctor's question all at once.

"It is improving," said Martok solemnly. He used his other hand to guide the bottle to Julian's mouth, and Julian tried to twist his own right hand to help.

The touch of the water to his lips was rapturous. The first flood of it in his mouth almost carried Julian away on an eddy of blissful relief. He gulped frantically, swallowing a bolus large enough to strain his pharynx and burn behind his breastbone with the chill of it. It should have made him colder, but his shivering actually seemed to ease.

"Slow down a little, Doctor," Martok advised, tilting the bottle back just enough that Julian couldn't take another draught immediately. "You don't want to make yourself ill."

The water seemed to have done something to clear the cobwebs from his rattled brain. Julian could feel the slick stickiness of his undergarments — now positively foul with prolonged wear that had finally overwhelmed the bacteriostatic properties of Starfleet's elaborately engineered fabrics. He knew his hair was damp with sweat. And yet he was still trembling with cold.

"Do I have a fever?" he asked, his voice a little less ragged now. "Feel my brow."

Martok looked down at his hands, both of which were occupied. Julian closed his right hand awkwardly around the bottle, tugging it gently to show he had control. Martok spread his palm across Julian's forehead. The palm was cool after contact with the bottle.

"Use the back of your hand instead," Julian advised. "It's more sensitive to the difference." And less likely to be affected by the caregiver's own body temperature, which was more readily felt by the nerve-rich and highly vascularized palm.

Martok flipped his hand obediently and looked thoughtful for a moment. Finally, he shook his head. "You feel perfectly normal," he said.

Julian wished he could take comfort in this, but a foundational tenet of exobiology was that a doctor had to constantly question his own base assumptions — or in this case, his proxy's base assumptions.

"Normal for a Klingon?" he asked.

Martok gave him a brief, quizzical look, and then grunted in the affirmative as he took back the bottle of water.

Julian closed his eyes and dared a tiny nod. Normal for a Klingon was hot for a human. He was definitely running a fever. He reached for the water again, and Martok helped him drink. This time, he took several slow swallows instead of one large, rapid one. It did more to quench his thirst, and caused no discomfort going down. But his stomach awoke like a snarling beast, and Julian had to grapple with a wave of maddening hunger.

It was his own fault for sleeping through the ration call, but that didn't make the frustration any easier to bear. He blinked determinedly against the feeling of helpless misery and forced himself to take another sip of water. It helped a little, in his mind if not in his belly.

He tried to look around the room. He couldn't see much around Martok's armoured bulk, but the space seemed unwontedly empty. "Where's Major Kalenna?" he asked at length.

"She had business with some of her compatriots," Martok said. "Do not fear for her safety," he added when Julian's brow furrowed, apparently misreading perplexity for concern. "The Sub-Lieutenant is with her, as is the Breen."

Julian wondered how they had been able to make the Breen understand that they should follow the Romulans. He supposed rudimentary sign language could accomplish as much. It was even possible, considering the careful note they had apparently taken of his injuries, that the Breen's own observational skills had been sufficient to piece together the need. There was a keen intelligence under that inscrutable helmet, and no small measure of compassion.

He wondered what business Kalenna might have with the other Romulan prisoners. He decided that was too complex a thought for idle speculation, at least in his current state. He still felt the haze of concussion, and when he tried to remember the twenty-ninth Fibonacci number, the answer came too slowly.  _Five hundred fourteen thousand two hundred twenty-nine_. He closed his eyes and focused on easier puzzles.

"I lost consciousness when they… while they were kicking me," he mumbled. "What happened next?"

"Very little," said Martok grimly. "After you went limp, the First ceased his own assault, and one of the guards did the same. The small one had to be told to halt, but he obeyed without question." He growled in disgust. "The Jem'Hadar always obey without question. They are automatons."

Julian didn't have the wherewithal to argue that point. He was busy pondering bemusedly how any Jem'Hadar soldier could be referred to as "the small one". They were all at least six feet tall, broad and thickly muscled. He had never yet seen one (a fully grown one, anyhow) that he would have pegged as weighing less than a hundred kilograms of sheer brute strength.

"Why didn't they kill me?" he asked, unaware he had uttered the question aloud until Martok responded.

"I do not know," he said. "Nor do I know why they did not continue the beating even when you were no longer aware. When that Cardassian you aided was pulled out of the line, they did not stop until they were satisfied."

Julian pondered this. "Who gave the order for the small one to stop?" he asked. He'd wanted to try out the phrase. Even on his own lips, it sounded absurd. "Was it the First, or the Vorta?"

If it had been Ikat'ika, it was possible that he had been spared worse out of some sense of gratitude or obligation for saving the Eighth's life. But when the answer came from Martok, Julian was even more perplexed than before.

"The Vorta," the warrior said. He shook his head. "I do not understand the Dominion. They are without honour. They show no mercy. If they have kept you alive, it is for some purpose, Doctor, and I fear it will not be a pleasant one."

Julian supposed this was probably true. But there was nothing he could do about it now, and he was too exhausted for anxiety. He was beginning to feel warm again, moving into the other phase of the chill-and-sweat cycle of a high fever. His thirst was ameliorated for the present, and there was nothing he could do to ease his pain. He nudged his brain a little nearer the edge of the ravine of forgetfulness, and he found it needed little encouragement. Soon, he was asleep again.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

 

** Medical and Exobiology Glossary: **

**myoclonic jerk:**  a startle reflex that can occur on the verge of sleep. It is responsible for the "falling out of a tree" sensation.

 **celiac plexus:** a major network of nerves in the upper abdomen. Colloquially called the "solar plexus".

 **biceps femoris:** one of three long muscles on the back of the thigh, colloquially called "the hamstrings".

 **pharynx** : the upper part of the throat, before it divides into trachea (windpipe) and esophagus.


	34. A Tool of the Tal Shiar

**Part VI, Act V: A Tool of the Tal Shiar**

The rest of that day passed in a swirling haze of competing miseries. Julian slept sporadically, roused frequently by pain or cold or thirst. His scapula and arm still burned and throbbed and ached to the marrow, and now and again he would get a sharp stab of agony from his cheek. It was the feeling in his flank that worried him most. There was something venemous about the smouldering pain deep within him, and although he drank meticulously every time he woke, water was not easing the sensation.

Water  _was_  doing something else, however, and at last he had to confess to Parvok that he needed his help. Julian did not require Major Kalenna's reproachful glance to know that tottering to the end of the barracks pod was out of the question. Even getting up off the cot seemed unwise. So the Sub-Lieutenant brought the circuit casing that had been yesterday's emesis basin, and assisted Julian in the undignified but necessary process of using it as a bedpan. It was a degree of patient-caregiver intimacy with which neither of them was comfortable, but Parvok followed instructions and Julian did what he had to do.

The one clinical benefit to an otherwise profoundly humbling experience was that Julian was able to get a look at his urine at last. It was dark with blood. Even trace amounts would have been worrisome. Significant visual discolouration was very troubling indeed.

When the Romulan left his side to dispose of the waste, Julian closed his eyes and tried to fight back his fear. Sometimes it was a curse to know so much about the workings of humanoid bodies, especially his own. He tried to be rational. This finding changed nothing. He had already known his kidney was damaged. He had even known it was bleeding. He didn't doubt that today's "example" had damaged it further, but that was only a matter of degree. It was maddening to be unable to properly assess the state of the organ, and Julian's constant baseline longing for his medical tricorder was now consuming him. But regardless of what such a scan might have shown, he was powerless to act on information received: he had no access to an operating room or surgical tools, and even if he'd had  _them_  he could not operate on himself. Ignorance galled him, but knowledge would have changed nothing. He had to try to make peace with not knowing.

The overwhelming majority of blunt traumas to the kidneys could resolve on their own, given time, rest and ample fluid intake. Julian had time in abundance, and not much to fill it with but rest — at least between counts and the ration call he would have to find a way to make tomorrow. Fluids were more worrisome, but every time he woke and asked for his bottle it was given to him. Although he had emptied the first, the second was still half full. Kalenna took it from him now, capping it with care and tucking it back under the cot. Julian was visited with the vacant and meaningless musing that he thought that bottle had been half-full for quite some time now. At least three wakings? He was losing count.

"Is there anything more I can do, Doctor?" the Romulan woman asked quietly, settling on her knees beside his cot. She straightened the blankets, which had bunched awkwardly behind his knees while Parvok helped him with the bedpan, and drew them over Julian's body again. She took care to lower them slowly, gently, so that the sensory irritation to his left shoulder was minimized.

"I don't think so," Julian mumbled. He was still trying to speak out of the uninjured side of his face. "I need to thank you."

She shook her head. "We're the ones who are indebted. Tain reports that work on the transmitter is much faster now that he has power. It seems we should have done this weeks ago. He delayed as long as possible because of the need to distract the Vorta."

"That's not what I mean," Julian said. "I'm grateful for you care, of course, but I wanted to thank you for persuading Parvok to help me. I know that can't have been easy."

Kalenna's lips thinned and she stared fascinatedly at the wall behind him. "The Sub-Lieutenant lacks perspective," she said. "I expect him to do his share, even if he is not capable of the feats some of us can contribute. Tain's work inside the wall, the General's unending struggle, your own sacrifice, my…  _ingenuity_." She looked down at Julian when she said this, and he thought he saw a little self-satisfied gleam in her eyes. "All these things are beyond Parvok's reach, but if he expects to share in the rewards, he must do what he is able to advance our goals."

Julian managed a tiny nod, reluctant to upset the delicate balance of pains in his head. "The Breen," he said. "They've been helpful, too."

"Yes," Kalenna agreed. She glanced back over her shoulder to where the silent sentinel sat on the middle bunk, gloved hands spread on the tough, sandy-coloured fabric that covered their thighs. "Remarkably so. It seems they understand more of what is going on in this barracks than I have given them credit for. I wonder what they make of the goings-on inside the wall."

Julian could not begin to guess. His exhaustion was creeping up on him again, and with it the siren temptation of leaving the pain behind for a while. At least on Ajilon Prime the pain had been a finite thing. After that first excruciating half-hour, he'd been given medications to ease it. Though the discomfort had lingered for a few days after surgery, causing him difficulties during the evacuation of the hospital, it had never seemed this grinding and relentless. While these agonies were objectively less intense than the plasma burns, they were ceaseless. He wasn't sure he'd have the fortitude to endure weeks of this.

"Kalenna, tomorrow…" he said softly, too worn and weary to keep from considering this possibility. "What is the punishment? For missing the count, I mean."

The green flush of healthy circulation drained from her face, and she looked suddenly ashen. "You cannot miss the count," she said urgently. "They will kill you."

"General Martok thinks they're keeping me alive deliberately, for some specific purpose," said Julian. "I don't think they  _will_  kill me outright, not even for missing the count. And I don't know if I can face it."

The admission was out. If Tain was listening inside the wall, it was possible he'd heard it, even quiet as Julian's voice now was. As much as he did not want such information to fall into the elderly Cardassian's hands, Julian felt better for having said it. Confessing to his fear, to his cowardice, was a relief. She had been treating him with such deference, and he didn't really deserve it.

"You would gamble your life on the General's belief?" she asked sorrowfully.

Julian considered it for a moment. "In this case, yes. I think I would," he said. "After all, he understands too well what it is to be kept alive for the Dominion's ends. Doesn't he?"

"Yes…" Kalenna allowed, but she did not look convinced. "It is not worth the risk. We need you alive. We need you to recover."

If this morning had been any indication, Julian would not be allowed to recover. "I couldn't stand straight enough to satisfy Deyos today," he said. "Now I'm running a fever and I haven't eaten since yesterday. Tomorrow, I'll be too weak to last."

Kalenna glanced back over her shoulder. Julian did not know where Martok had gone, but apparently they were alone but for the Breen. The Major leaned closer and dropped her voice to a whisper. "I can help you," she said.

From the pocket of her tunic, she brought out what looked like a twist of waxed paper. She unwrapped it surreptitiously, revealing a small, chipped tablet the colour of aged ivory. Julian stared at it.

"Where did you get that?" he asked. He assumed it was some kind of medication, but he could not imagine how she might have obtained such a thing. "What is it?"

"It is called tripromylin," Kalenna said. "It is intended to improve alertness and to reduce pain in the event a Tal Shiar operative is tortured."

 _Tripromylin_. Julian thought he remembered reading about such a drug, probably in a Starfleet Intelligence dossier on the Tal Shiar. He had been curious about it at the time — stimulants and analgesics often had antagonistic effects on alertness, and it was rare to see one drug that could function as both. Cocaine was one such example. So was this.

"But how? Where did it come from?" Julian asked, bewildered. Surely medications would have been confiscated along with communications devices, weapons, and food when prisoners were first searched.

Kalenna pulled down her lower lip, opening her mouth. Her first molar was gone from the left side of her jaw, a bloody socket in its place. Her other teeth were stained with streaks and speckles of green cruor. "Sub-Commander Darok was kind enough to remove it," she told him as she released her lip.

At his expression, she smiled sardonically. "It wouldn't be much of a survival tool if a captor could find it," she said. "Don't worry: it was sealed inside the tooth. It has had no contact with my saliva."

That wasn't what Julian was worried about. She had endured what had surely been a painful extraction just to secure him this dose of a questionable drug? He was madly trying to remember its mechanism of action in the body, wondering if it was even safe for humans. He couldn't remember the elimination pathway, either, and that was far more critical in his case.

"It is effective in your species," Kalenna said, reading at least one of his questions with uncanny accuracy. "It has been thoroughly tested in humans, Vulcans, Orions, Anticans, and Gallamites. It was safe in all five, though inefficacious in Gallamites. You can expect its effects to last for eight hours: more than long enough for the count and for ration call."

Julian did not know what to say. "Major…" he murmured.

She shook her head slightly. "You cannot miss the count."

 _(fade_ )

He did not miss the count. The medication took almost instantaneous effect when he took it the next morning, after waking in a muddled fugue of pain and disorientation and unbearable hunger. It seemed to heighten his vision, rendering the barracks brighter and the edges of everything he saw somehow crisper. Hearing was muted a little, and his bodily torments receded to a great distance. They were not numbed, exactly, nor reduced in the way that morphenolog or triptacederine would have done done, but merely removed to a more remote part of his mind.

Best of all was the surge of energy Julian felt as the tablet melted against his buccal tissue. He felt alert and fully aware for the first time since the fight — indeed, almost for the first time since being snatched from Meezan IV. The tremors in his limbs ceased, and when Parvok and Kalenna helped him rise, he found he was able to do so with very little effort. He knew it wouldn't last, and that he would pay for every exertion made under the influence of the medication, but at the moment he did not care. He was ambulatory, and took his place in the line with very little difficulty.

The count itself was brisk by Deyos's standards: he only dropped it three times, the third when he stopped in front of Julian.

"Standing straighter today, I see," he said. His eyes narrowed and he leaned nearer to mutter; "I wonder what your secret is, Doctor. Never mind: a mystery for another day!" Then he walked on, starting over from  _two_.

When the after-count crowd in the waste reclamation room dispersed, Julian decided to take advantage of the Tal Shiar's wonderdrug to discharge a biological function he had been dreading. Parvok helped him remove the bandages that bound his humerus, and the sling that supported his lower arm. Actually getting his left arm out of the sleeve of his jumpsuit was a more difficult undertaking, and it left Julian in no doubt that he was indeed still in pain. But without Kalenna's gift, the manoeuvre would have been unbearable.

As it was, he was able to set his teeth against it and take care of his body's needs. His stool was small and hard, showing the effects of both the meagre diet and his body's jealous husbandry of water. But when he was cleaned up and dressed again, and Kalenna had re-bandaged his arm, he felt better for having passed it. He did not want to lie down, fearing that if he fell asleep his body would overcome the effects of the drug. Instead, he checked Martok's elbow, which was growing more stable with each passing day, and then induced Enabran Tain to let him listen to his chest again.

The Cardassian mounted only a cursory protest, which Julian found troubling. It seemed to indicate that either he took his condition more seriously than his earlier words and actions implied, or that he was in pain today. But the heartbeat was steadier and his pulse a little faster, and even the whisper of fluid in the lungs was quieter today. The increased hours in the warmth of the wall seemed to be having their desired effect.

"Well, Doctor? Am I going to live?" Tain teased when Julian finally straightened up, swaying only a little, and told him to put his shirts back on.

"There's a marked improvement," Julian allowed. "It's promising. You need to continue what you're doing, and stay as warm as possible."

"That's hardly likely while you're the one using all the blankets," said Tain wryly, smirking as he tugged his head free of his collar. "They've been making quite a fuss over you, Doctor, and yet here you are: up on your feet looking like a new man. Can it be you've got some secret to vivacity that you're keeping from the rest of us?"

He hadn't heard Kalenna's whispers, then. Julian wasn't about to betray the Major's secret, especially not to the collector of mysteries and conundrums. She might have given him her dose, but there were other Tal Shiar operatives throughout the prison who likely still had theirs. Julian didn't think any of them would appreciate a visit from a spymaster turned amateur dentist.

"I'm feeling more like myself today," he allowed. "Perhaps you're right, and my injuries weren't very serious after all."

He couldn't help injecting a little venom into his words. His injuries  _were_ serious, and he had no idea of knowing  _how_  serious. He was more concerned about his kidney than ever. If triptomylin was renally excreted, he could be in for some very grave trouble later on. Julian had debated taking the drug at all, when he could not for the life of him remember anything about its metabolic pathway through the body. Kalenna did not know, though she had dutifully tried to feed him everything she did know about the compound. Very little of it had been useful, but it sounded like Julian might be in for some interesting dreams when it finally started to wear off.

He passed the rest of the time until ration call quietly, sitting upright on one of the benches and exploring his pain from the welcome distance of the drug. it was a curiously contemplative exercise. He felt light-headed despite his steadiness, as if his brain might drift away on a heavy breeze.

When the time came to queue up for the meal, he joined his cellmates and drew his ration. Parvok had to take his bottles: with his arm bound to his side, Julian could not manage them and the plate. He thought the Jem'Hadar would object to this violation of the Order of Things, mealtime edition. But it seemed that they had been given instructions to tolerate some irregularities from the human: when Julian handed off the canteens to Parvok so he could accept his measure of mush, the guards scowled but said nothing.

Leaning back against the wall was out of the question. Julian settled in the middle of the floor instead. He wanted to cross his legs, and almost believed that he could until he tried to bend the right one. It resisted, and he felt a distantly sickening pull in the ligaments. He let it stretch out in front of him instead, and tucked up his left for balance. Then he scooped up his first fingerful of slop and tucked it carefully into the left side of his mouth.

It was utterly tasteless: there was not even a trace of the strong thiamine flavour that made it so grimly unappetizing at other times. Apparently the triptomylin had numbed the part of the brain in charge of interpreting flavours. Julian didn't care. His mouth flooded with saliva at once, and his empty stomach churned and gurgled and sobbed with gratitude. He ate hurriedly, scraping up every morsel he could. Licking the plate was too much of a contortion for his broken face: even distanced from the pain, he knew better than to push his luck. It was a shame, because his stomach wasn't truly full and he gladly could have eaten a whole second helping of stewed grain and alien legumes. But Julian felt better for the food he'd had, and he knew it was far better than yesterday's nothing.

He had just handed his plate off to Parvok, who was gathering the group's dishes for return, when a shadow fell across Julian's lap.

"On your feet, human," a stern voice commanded. Julian looked up into the stony eyes of First Ikat'ika.

Kalenna scrambled up off the ground. "What do you want with him?" she asked, wary but not defiant.

The First gave her a cold look. "He has work to do," he said grimly. "He made an agreement."

"An agreement?" said Tain, suddenly very interested. He looked at Julian, wide-eyed with mock curiosity. "What manner of agreement, Doctor?"

Julian tried to climb to his feet, but the medication seemed to have made him clumsy. His left boot slipped against the floor, and his right one couldn't seem to get a good grip. He planted his free hand and tried to push himself onto his knees, but Ikat'ika grabbed that arm and hauled him one-handed into a standing position. The room rocked perilously and Julian's head seemed to flounder. But the grip on his arm would not let him fall, and he found himself stumbling along beside the First, through the crowd of seated prisoners who hastened to scoot out of the way, out of the mess area and across the atrium.

In the shadow of one of the pillars, where it blocked the line of sight from the mouth of the administration pod, stood two more Jem'Hadar. One was the Third, his weapon at the ready. The other was Eighth Talak'ran. There was a sheen of perspiration on his brow, and he seemed to be struggling to stand. Ikat'ika shoved Julian towards him, releasing his grasp. Julian stumbled, a jolt of pain suddenly swooping near to blaze through his shoulder-blade before retreating once more to the blessed, drug-enforced distance in his mind. He righted himself and forced his right eye open a little wider as he studied the Eighth's face.

"What is wrong with him?" the First demanded. "He has been like this for seventeen hours. Assist him."

Julian swallowed both apprehension and a shiver of hot nausea rising from his now very much occupied belly. He forced his mind to focus on clinical assessment, to fix its faculties on his patient. The Jem'Hadar's pupils were tiny pinions despite the gloom, and he was quaking where he stood.

"Do you have pain at the site of your wound?" he asked.

Talak'ran glared at him with incandescent hatred, his jaw set in a hard line that only emphasized the spikes that rimmed it. First Ikat'ika made a low noise of disapproval.

"Answer him," he commanded.

"Some," said Talak'ran tightly.

Ikat'ika pressed something into Julian's palm. It crinkled. "You said you would change the dressings on the second day," he growled. "Attend to his wound."

Julian looked down to see two of the foil packets that held sterile dressings. He held them out to the First again. "Open one," he said. "I can't."

While the Jem'Hadar commander did as he was told, Julian pulled back the square that he had affixed over the place where the White port should have been. The skin beneath was mildly inflamed. In this light, he could not be sure if there was any discolouration, but there were no other signs of infection. That was hardly surprising: his studies on the Jem'Hadar infant that had been found on Deep Space Nine two years ago had indicated a hypercharged immune system capable of obliterating virtually any known pathogen.

Julian carefully plucked out the plug of gauze keeping the scarred channel open. He tried to visualize the passage without contact, but the light was too poor. He briefly considered asking for the medical scanner he had used in the ring, but remembered just in time that it was in the hands of the Vorta. Judging from their position, the First did not want Deyos involved.

"I need to feel inside your neck," he said to the Eighth, as calmly and reassuringly as possible. "There may be some discomfort, but I'll try not to hurt you."

He watched the glowering face, waiting for permission. Talak'ran was studiously avoiding his eyes, staring at the bars that branched off of the pylon instead. Ikat'ika growled, "Do it!"

Julian nodded. He didn't have a free hand to brace himself or to guide his primitive probe, so he splayed the side of his thumb along the soldier's collarbone and carefully slipped his index finger into the hole. It was dry and smooth, with only the slight striations of the scar tissue. His nail was ragged, untrimmed since his last day in his Infirmary. He felt a pang of sudden, unbearable homesickness as he thought of performing this examination in his brightly-lit triage room, armed with a tricorder, his patient sitting in comfort on a biobed, all the accouterments of a corrective surgery ready in the next room. He beat it back and forced himself to focus as he navigated his finger slowly, carefully inward until he could feel the flap of tissue he had regenerated to cover the vein.

"Everything's fine here," he said, withdrawing the digit with equal care. He took the square of gauze waiting for him, and rolled it into a neat tube against his palm. He inserted it carefully, and then covered it with the other.

"Do you hurt anywhere else?" he asked the Jem'Hadar. "Do you feel dizzy? Nauseous? Weak in the limbs?"

Talak'ran glanced at the First, doubtless gauging whether he dared to refuse to answer. Ikat'ika's expression was answer enough. "Yes," the Eighth snarled. "All of that."

Julian nodded. He looked at Ikat'ika. "How well has it worked, administering the Ketracel White every fifteen minutes? Are you able to manage it with perfect regularity?"

"Yes," said Ikat'ika. "When my duties prevent me, the Third takes charge of the task."

The Third glowered and shifted his hold on his rifle. Julian closed his eyes momentarily, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He had two options: more frequent dosing, or a higher dose per interval. He had a feeling both would be needed, but only one was readily doable.

"I'd like to go back to administering it every five minutes," he said. "It would mean he would need constant supervision."

"The Vorta doctor will arrive in twenty hours," said Ikat'ika. "We can manage until then."

"Do you have the hypo?" Julian asked the Third. He scowled and did not reply, but he removed his hand from the trigger of the rifle and reached into a hip-holster to remove the device. Julian looked at the display screen, still thinking. "I would like to give him another ekate per dose, but that means he'll need more than the contents of one vial per day. Is that feasible?"

"For twenty hours, anything is feasible," said Ikat'ika grimly. "Do what you must."

Julian made the adjustments and had the First double-check the number. He was almost certain he was right, but his brain was feeling foggy again and he didn't want to trust to his judgement alone. He applied the device to the other side of the Eighth's neck, and watched the man's eyes close in blissful relief as the drug reached his heart.

"If that's not enough, increase it by another ekate," he said, giving the ersatz-hypospray to the First. "If it still doesn't ease his symptoms, come and find me."

"You are remarkably recovered today," the First said, eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Yesterday you could hardly stand, even before you were  _corrected_."

Julian curled his lip sardonically. "Disappointed?" he asked.

"I am disinterested, both in your suffering and in your welfare," said Ikat'ika. "If I were to guess, I would say the Vorta is disappointed, yes. Beware, human. Deyos is a dangerous adversary."

"I'll try to remember that," said Julian. He looked down at the medical tool in the First's scaly hand. "Every five minutes. Please be diligent."

He turned to walk away, but the sudden shift in attitude proved too much. The atrium whirled around him, the dome flying through his peripheral vision as if he were standing in the core of a child's spinning top. Only he wasn't standing anymore, but falling, crashing forward onto his knees and thrusting out his hand only just quickly enough to spare his nose from smashing into the composite stone. Agony awoke in every battered part of his body: shoulder blade, cheekbone, ribs, flank, knee, abdomen, skull. Julian's brain felt jostled and shaken again, like a bruised peach that had been flung down a flight of stairs. Unbearable nausea and blind agony threatened to swallow him, and his hammering heart echoed in stinging ears.

The Jem'Hadar were marching past him. One boot clipped his hip, but he didn't think it was intentional: a glancing blow from an appendage just passing by. He shrank in on himself nonetheless, a scared, childlike part of his brain quailing in horror.  _Don't hurt me, don't hurt me, please don't hurt me anymore!_

The plea was not meant only for the Jem'Hadar, but for the shadowy figures behind the frosted screen. They were preparing the probes again, the ones that they stuck into his legs and his hips and his sternum — what was a sternum? Not until years from now, many years from now when he lounged in a narrow bed in a brightly lit dormitory room overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, would Julian read about totipotent cells and understand what the Adigeon doctors had been trying to access inside of his body's primary wells of marrow. For now he was alone, and he was frightened, and he was strapped to this bed or huddled on this floor (he did not really understand which), and the agony blotted out understanding that might never have been there in the first place.

 _(fade_ )

The others found him when they came from the meal. He didn't know how they got him back to the barracks and onto his cot. All of that was hazy, as were the long hours that followed, while he shivered under blankets that seemed to do nothing to keep him warm, and accepted desperate, shallow sips of water when someone held his bottle to his lips. Julian kept drifting in and out of garbled remembrances of other pains in other times, and different dark shades of terror and confusion and hopelessness and guilt.

At one point, he heard Kalenna whisper, "I don't understand: it should have lasted twice as long as it did." And Julian wanted to explain to her about his genetically enhanced liver, doubly gifted at scrubbing his blood of toxins and pharmaceuticals alike. Doctors who had treated him in the past, when they discovered that he required higher-than-average doses of anesthetic or analgesic, had chalked it up to him being a natural ultrarapid cytochrome P450 metabolizer. But he couldn't explain to Kalenna, even if it wouldn't have been colossaly foolish to do so. He couldn't muster the strength to speak.

One thing was comforting about all of this: the drug hadn't gone through his kidneys after all.

 _(fade to black_ )

* * *

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**triptomylin (pharm.):** a 24th Century Romulan medication.

 **morphenolog (pharm.):** a 24th Century analgesic medication. (Ep. 3.13, "Life Support")

 **buccal tissue:** the tissue on the inside of the cheeks. It provides rapid absorption of some medications.

 **totipotent cells:**  undifferentiated cells that can grow into any type of cell in the body. Colloquially called "stem cells".

 **cytochrome P450:** a family of proteins used in enzymatic reactions in the liver, essential for breaking down many medications.


	35. Teaser: Behind the Bar

_Note: Yes, I know the economics of the Federation are vague and continue to be shrouded in mystery. I'm not changing that today. I've cobbled together the few references ther are into what I hope is a coherent and workable day-to-day system, at least as far as Quark is concerned. And please, PLEASE don't ask me to explain how we got there from here. Apparently it had something to do with humanity waking up one day and saying, "Wait, what's wrong with us? We rounded up the homeless and put them in walled ghettos? THIS FAR AND NO FARTHER!" Also, I think there was a nuclear war?_

**Part VII, Teaser: Behind the Bar**

The noon rush had died down, and it was now Quark's least favourite part of the afternoon. Half the wait staff worked a split shift on any given day, so that he didn't have to stand behind the bar watching his profits trickle away in pointless payroll while most of the tables stood empty. But he couldn't send  _everyone_  off, because even at ebb tide the bar still drew a trickle of patrons. He swept the upper level with an appraising eye. There was only one group of diners: a trio of Bajoran civilians deep in conversation over some sort of sketch. A solitary Lissepian sat with his back to a corner, nursing the same tall glass of Antarean brandy he had been toying with for an hour and a half.

On the main level, business prospects were a little better. The engineering crew that had been crawling around in the conduits all morning had finally stopped for a late lunch: two Starfleet officers, two Bajoran. They were laughing, and they had already called for a second plate of hasperat to share around while they waited for their main course. A Bolian freighter captain was in close conference with the quadrotritacale wholesaler who had been hanging around the station this week. Whatever they were talking about, it was apparently thirsty work: the waiters had been keeping them well-supplied with a steady stream of Yridian ale for two hours straight. Morn was at the bar, of course, perched on his customary stool. And a morose-looking Andorian seemed intent on drinking himself under the table at the back.

There was no one at the dabo wheel but Leeta, spinning it idly so that the whirring ratchet of the paddle filled the room, enticing the ears of any potential gamblers who might wander by. All told, it wasn't a  _bad_  showing for mid-afternoon. But still: Quark much preferred to see business booming.

He picked up one of his data pads and thumbed through the evening's holosuite reservations. These, too, were respectable but not remarkable. Doctor Bashir had three hours booked starting at 2100. Quark hoped he'd either show up for it, or forget to cancel before the no-fault deadline at 1800 hours. Starfleet drove a hard bargain: in the old days, a reservation was a binding contract, even if you tried to cancel three  _days_  beforehand. But then again, some of Quark's patrons in the old days would have rather broken his arm than pay for a missed reservation, whatever the policy. If a  _hew-mon_  officer reneged at the last minute, at least the Federation would honour the fee.

Quark wondered if the Doctor  _would_ cancel. He'd pulled out of his last reservation with six hours to spare, offering a flimsy excuse to Quark and an even flimsier one to Chief O'Brien, who'd been meant to join him for whatever old Earth battle simulation had captured their fancies this month. Quark didn't understand the appeal himself: two grown men charging around brandishing swords or piloting primitive lower-atmosphere flight craft in a holosuite that could accommodate  _much_  more enticing fantasies. Doctor Bashir's silly spy program was at least populated with beautiful females clad in appropriately revealing outfits, but he seemed to spend more time infiltrating embassies with them or standing back-to-back in firefights than actually enjoying their charms.

Ah, well: it didn't really matter what the good Doctor got up to in the holosuite, so long as he affixed his thumbprint to the bill so that Quark could bill Starfleet against the man's leisure hours stipend. The whole arrangement had seemed absurd to Quark five years ago. The Federation had no internal currency system, relying instead on some sort of philosophy of personal and communal betterment to encourage productivity from its citizens. It was a system that should have collapsed in on itself two centuries ago, as soon as  _hew-mons_  realized there were greater opportunities for advancement out there in the rest of the Quadrant, where latinum and other currencies abounded and unimaginable luxuries could be obtained by the gifted and the clever. But it hadn't collapsed, and the Federation flourished: the most resource-rich power in the entire Alpha Quadrant, upheld and protected by a fleet of state-of-the-art starships manned by highly skilled and enormously dedicated  _volunteer_ combatants who gave of their time, their energy, and their talents, and even risked their lives, for nothing more than the satisfaction of a job well done. It was baffling.

Of course, Federation citizens in general and Starfleet officers in particular wanted for nothing: food, clothing, education, medical care, housing, real estate, technology, energy — all these things the Federation had in abundance and provided to its people with a profligate generosity that had perplexed Ferengi economist-philosophers since First Contact in the twenty-second century. If there was some kind of limitation on the resources any one person could draw on, or some way that assets were allotted according to merit, Quark couldn't see it and didn't understand it. The whole arrangement had a mystical quality to it that even the  _hew-mons_  he'd questioned about the inner workings of their economy seemed unable to answer in any great detail. All that was obvious from the outside was that the Federation had greater material wealth than they knew what to do with, and they were never at a disadvantage in trade negotiations with other powers.

The Federation personnel stationed on Deep Space Nine transacted business with Quark and other non-Federation merchants by means of a leisure stipend provided to them by Starfleet. Each officer had a personal account that could be drawn upon, and when they made a purchase they simply affixed their thumbprint to the appropriate record. Once a week, Quark submitted an invoice and Starfleet Accounting paid out in gold-pressed latinum, his particular currency of choice. Many Promenade merchants requested the same. Some of the Bajoran shopkeepers wanted litas instead, and for some reason the cobbler on the other side of the Promenade took isiks. All of these were exchanged at standard rates from Federation commodity credits by the Bank of Bolias according to the various treaties in place with non-Federation worlds.

Quark had no idea what the cap on an officer's leisure stipend might be, whether it varied according to rank or duty load, or whether there was in fact any limit at all: in five years of Federation management on Deep Space Nine, he had never had a charge refused because an officer had overspent his or her stipend. When this system had first been proposed to him, he had seen only the gross potential for just that sort of abuse — and the subsequent loss of profit. It sounded entirely too much like extending credit, which was the very antithesis of a Ferengi business model.

Sisko, then a Commander newly assigned to a near-derelict husk that until a couple of days before had been orbiting a devastated world, had tried to explain. "Think of yourself as a contractor," he'd said, in his airy, oddly inspirational voice. "On a starship, my officers would have access to holodecks and hospitality services provided by Starfleet. We  _could_  install our own facilities here, but that would take time and resources. So instead, Starfleet is willing to delegate the provision of those services to you, Quark!"

Quark had been reluctant to agree, but he hadn't had much choice. Sisko had managed to compel him to stay, and the Federation had been in charge, and that was all there was to it. Quark had consented to giving the system a month's trial.

And wonder of wonders, it had worked! Not only did Starfleet pay the invoices on time (often without checking them over too closely, at least for the first two or three years), but as landlords they could not have been more generous. The exorbitant rent Quark had owed the Cardassians was replaced with a no-cost lease agreement. There were no more bribes to be provided to the Prefect or the customs and excise staff. His monthly bill for his facilities' drain on the station's power supply had been replaced by a monthly analysis report with no price attached and no payment requested. If he needed maintenance work that proved beyond Rom's scope, a team of Starfleet engineers turned up, fixed the problem, and more often than not ordered a round of synthale before they left — billed to their liesure stipend accounts and paid for by Accounting at the end of the week. Quark had gone from struggling to put tube grubs on the table to swimming in profits by the end of the first year.

He'd made some questionable business decisions since then, of course. A sudden influx of free-flowing latinum had encouraged him to make risky investments. And Brunt's devious ploy last year had cost Quark everything he had — or so he'd believed at the time.

But the Ferengi Commerce Authority hadn't been able to take his absurd no-cost Federation lease, and although they had stripped the bar to the bare bulkheads, they hadn't been able to drive him out of business. Sisko and the others had seen to that. Quark would never forget sitting on the dais in the empty cavern that had once been his modest little empire, lost and bewildered and wondering how he was going to clothe himself in the morning, since he had to remit even the garments on his back to Brunt. And then  _they_  had come in: the  _hew-mons_ (well, the  _hew-mons_  and Dax).

Starfleet officers bearing gifts, in such a way that it would have been unthinkable to refuse. Doctor Bashir had led the way with a case of Alvanian brandy, cheerfully declaring the stuff — worth at least fifteen strips of latinum on the open market — to be "undrinkable". His cheerful disregard for Quark's protests had been both exasperating and oddly endearing, much like young Julian himself. Then came Jadzia with her ugly tumblers; the same ones that now had pride of place over the replicators. And just when Quark had been dismissing their radiant smiles and their misguided altruism and their identical clothes, he had heard the Captain bark his name, so authoritatively that he'd scrambled to his feet as if he were one of the man's inexplicable Starfleet volunteers.

 _We're doing some structural repair on Level 2 of the Habitat Ring. We need a place to store some extra furniture for the next few months, and it looks like you have the room_ , Sisko had said, ushering in an apparently unending parade of people bearing tables, chairs and barstools. Not just Starfleet officers, either: Morn had been in their number, and a dozen other loyal customers rounded up to show their support. Quark had protested, still the consummate Ferengi no matter what Brunt and the FCA wanted to make him, and had demanded a fee for "storing" the furnishings. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he feared he had overstepped. But Sisko had just looked at him with those cool, calm eyes.  _Send me the bill_ , he'd said.

And like all of Starfleet's bills, it was paid promptly — not at the end of the week, in this case, but by close of business that very day: the first profits of Quark's new life as a pariah from his own world and an integral signatory to the Federation's inscrutable social contract by which no one was left in need.

He still didn't really understand any of it, but Quark was content to play along. The crowning irony was that the FCA ban had actually secured him a more favourable exchange rate. Stripped of his status as a Ferengi citizen-earner, he was no longer covered by the Ferengi Alliance's trade treaties with the Federation. So Sisko had suggested he redraw his provider contract with Starfleet as an independent merchant under the Bajoran treaty instead. If Quark had known he could earn an extra twelve percent on his dealings with the Federation, he would have aligned himself with Bajor long ago.

It was a much-needed sliver of an advantage: Quark was desperate to keep the latinum coming in. He had lost all of his Ferengi customers, apart from his brother and his nephew. He could no longer supplement his income by transacting hip-pocket deals with his old web of Ferengi contacts, licit and otherwise. Worse, his investment portfolio had been slashed to ribbons by the FCA ban, and what equity he had was all in one place: the Sepian Commodities Exchange. It was a worrying lack of diversity, and it always seemed most ominous in the middle of the afternoon.

Chief O'Brien strode into the bar and sat down heavily next to Morn. "Scotch, neat," he said tightly.

Welcoming the distraction from thoughts of his fragile antimonium options, Quark grabbed a glass and reached for the appropriate bottle. As he turned to his loyal customer, he took pause. O'Brien looked terrible: drawn and strained, and ashen. He was a man who'd had a bad shock.

"Something wrong, Chief?" he asked.

O'Brien grunted in the affirmative. "Funny, I thought you'd have heard by now," he said dazedly.

Quark shrugged expansively. "I can't be the first one to hear everything," he said. It had been a quiet day on the Promenade. Well, apart from Doctor Bashir bolting out of the Infirmary at full tilt, running for the nearest turbolift in the wake of one of his nurses — but that had been right in the middle of the lunch rush, and anyway, the Doctor was always charging off to one medical emergency or another, wasn't he? It was a little odd for him not to be the one leading the way, but otherwise it was business as usual. Quark tilted the bottle to pour. "Enlighten me."

O'Brien glared at him, and for a moment Quark expected a brusque dismissal. Then the Chief's shoulders sagged as he curled his hand around the glass of amber fluid. "There was an explosion in my quarters. Kira's friends are dead."

Quark's eyes grew wide. He hadn't been expecting an answer like  _that_. "What kind of explosion?" he asked breathlessly. "What  _friends_?"

The Chief knocked back half of his whiskey in one shot. He shook his head, grimacing against the smoky burn of the liquor. "Two of her friends from the old days. They were staying with us because… you know what, Quark? It doesn't matter. Kira was down there, trying to help them. She had to be rushed into the Infirmary because she suffered a placental laceration."

Quark couldn't help looking out the open-air window that looked down towards the Infirmary with its blue staff-and-serpent emblem glowing proudly above the door.

"That's where Bashir was running?" he muttered, dismayed. Everyone on the station had been following the drama of the O'Brien's second offspring with considerable interest for months. There was even a betting pool for the baby's due date. Quark's money was on thirteen days from today. "Is Major Kira…"

"She's going to recover," O'Brien said miserably, polishing off the rest of his drink and slamming the glass down. He nodded at it pointedly, and Quark obliged him by tipping out another measure. "At least physically. Julian got there in time, and she'll be ready to leave in a couple of hours. But her friends are  _dead,_ Quark. Five of them, in under a week! What if she's next?"

Quark shook his head. He didn't know what to say. He wasn't even sure what to think. This was all a little too much to take in. Someone was killing Major Kira's friends?

"What kind of friends are we talking about here?" he asked. "Starfleet officers? Bajoran militia? Friends from the old days, you said; surely not First Minister Shakaar…"

O'Brien made a disgusted sound. He was clearly trying to fight off a considerably stronger emotion. "Not Shakaar, at least not yet," he said. "Other people from her old Resistance cell. She's… it's been a nightmare for her. I don't like it."

What he meant was that he was worried sick for her. Quark found that peculiarly touching, and frankly kind of resented that a  _hew-mon_ could arouse the emotion in him. Still, he liked Chief O'Brien as much as the next man, and he knew his newfound closeness with Major Kira went beyond the fact that she was carrying his son. They were close friends now, much closer than they had been six months ago. And Quark had lived among  _hew-mons_  long enough to understand how they valued their friends. Like a Ferengi valued latinum.

A door hissed open. It was unlikely that O'Brien could hear it over the buzz of the Promenade, with his considerably smaller lobes. Morn  _definitely_  wouldn't be able to. But to Quark the sound was crisp and clear. He stole a glance over his shoulders towards the Infirmary, and saw Bashir stride out, looking around purposefully. His eyes met Quark's for a moment, then focused beyond him. He made straight for the front door of the bar.

"Chief! There you are," he said as he crossed the threshold. O'Brien didn't turn to look at him. He knocked back the last of his whiskey and indicated that Quark should serve up another. Bashir came around to his friend's left and leaned one arm on the bar. "Why did you run off? I thought you wanted an update."

"You gave me an update," O'Brien said sourly. "You said she'll be fine."

"She will," Bashir agreed, nodding tightly. "She's awake now, and she's lucid. I've given her the bad news."

He said this last so casually. Quark felt a little uneasy. He wasn't an expert in human interactions, but something about that delivery was troubling. As if informing Kira that her friends had been killed while she strained herself trying to save them was just another part of an ordinary day in the life of a Federation doctor.

Then again, O'Brien didn't seem to take it amiss, so maybe Quark was wrong. The Chief hung his head over his glass and sighed heavily. "Yeah? How'd she take it?"

"Like a good soldier," said Julian solemnly. He was watching his friend with very earnest eyes. Quark felt himself relax a little. That looked more like the Doctor Bashir he knew.

"Why'd you leave her alone?" O'Brien asked, suddenly straightening. He began to get to his feet. "She shouldn't be left alone."

"She's not alone," Bashir said calmly. "Odo's with her. They're talking. I thought it best to give them some privacy. He cares a great deal for her, you know."

This was news to Quark. He snorted. "Odo? Cares for Kira?"

"Of course he does," said Miles morosely. "They've been friends for years, since the Occupation."

"Exactly," said Bashir, a little too laboriously. Quark frowned at him, but he was still watching the Chief.

"What's wrong?" a high, musical voice asked. Spiked heels clicked on the deck plating as Leeta approached, her brows furrowed in concern. "Chief? You look…"

"I'm fine," said O'Brien crossly. He tried to take another swallow of whiskey, but the glass was empty. He glared at it and set it down with a  _clack_. "Just like Kira's going to be."

He climbed to his feet. He was still steady, but he might not be for long. "Tell her I'll be in the Habitat Ring, overseeing the repair crew." He shambled for the door.

Quark looked at Bashir, who was still lounging against the bar, watching as the Chief strode off up the Promenade. "Is that it?" he asked.

The Doctor looked at him uncomprehendingly. "Is what it?" he asked.

"Aren't you going to go after him?" asked Quark.

"He looks upset," Leeta agreed, frowning in the direction that O'Brien had vanished.

"Of course he's upset! There was an explosion in his quarters," Quark said exasperatedly. Sometimes Leeta's wide-eyed naïveté drove him crazy. She was well-intentioned: there was no arguing that. And she was cleverer than she let on — too clever for a female, really. But how someone who had grown up under the heel of the Cardassians still managed to be so shocked and dismayed by the cruelty of the Universe, Quark didn't understand.

"An  _explosion_?" she echoed. She looked fearfully at Bashir. "Was anyone hurt? Keiko — Molly?"

"They're away," said Bashir. Quark found it odd that he didn't take her fluttering hand.  _Hew-mons_  loved such comforting gestures, and even though Leeta and the Doctor weren't lovers anymore, their break-up had been obscenely civil. "Two people were killed when the room depressurized — old friends of Kira's who were staying with them."

Leeta's eyes shone with tears;  _tears_  for people she hadn't even met, whose names she didn't know. She'd grown up watching people all around her die; how was it she hadn't built up callouses around these kinds of feelings? Quark had certainly been compelled to. "That's awful," she said. "Poor Major Kira; she must be devastated."

"Hmm," said Bashir distractedly. He seemed lost in thought, and he was all but ignoring his one-time paramour. He hitched his hip over the rim of the nearest barstool and sat down, leaning on his elbow.

Leela's brow furrowed, intensifying the ridges of her nose. "Julian? Are you all right?" she asked.

Bashir inhaled a shallow snort, startled out of his reverie. He blinked at her stiltedly, as if he'd forgotten she was there. "Yes, of course," he said after a moment. "It just seems as if we go from one crisis to the next around here, doesn't it? So much disorder…"

Quark chuckled with dour amusement. "You can say that again, Doctor," he agreed. "I gave up on my 'consecutive uneventful days' pool years ago: no one ever wanted to lay a bet on longer than a week."

Leeta shot him a reproving look. "Quark!" she said. She laid a solicitous hand on Bashir's arm. "You can talk to me, Julian. At least… I hope we can still talk to each other, still be friends?"

Quark made a disgusted noise at this, and moved up the bar to serve Morn another drink. What was the fun of watching the collapse of a romantic relationship if both parties were determined to be so  _nice_  about it? He had offered these two the same opinion on Risa, and had very much enjoyed the spanner Leeta had promptly thrown into the works with her revelation about her attraction to Rom. Of course, the announcement itself was baffling and faintly nauseating — but then again, neither the dabo girl nor his idiot brother had taken any steps to advance a romance, so hopefully it would come to nothing.

"Yes, I'd like that," Bashir was saying, rather woodenly. There was a moment's hesitation before he added, " _Leeta_."

She smiled and bounced a little in relief. Her skintight costume jiggled with her in all the right places. She was an  _exceptionally_  attractive female, even among Quark's many alluring employees. And she had a good head for the odds: not since the days when he'd been allowed to run crooked tables (provided he restricted his tampering to alien customers and didn't get caught fleecing his Cardassian overlords) had Quark turned better profits than Leeta could generate with her astute eye for the wheel. He grudgingly admitted, at least to himself, that it was impressive how far she could improve the house's position while still abiding by the rules of the game.

"Maybe we could have a drink one night, for old time's sake," she said. She smiled coyly. "Fanalian toddy for two?"

Bashir looked at her blankly, then grinned a little too broadly to compensate. "Sure, whatever you like," he said. He beckoned to the bartender. "Quark, would you oblige us?"

Quark's eyes narrowed. "Aren't you on duty, Doctor?" he asked. It wasn't like the conscientious physician to imbibe during working hours. He heard the hiss of the Infirmary door again, and glanced back over his shoulder to see Odo emerge. He strode purposefully up towards the Security office, looking pensive.

So did Bashir, come to that. His look of puzzled thought dissolved as he said, "Of course, the alcohol! Better make it a karvino juice for me, Quark."

Leeta flushed. "I… didn't really mean  _now_ ," she said, twisting her hands in a way that somehow emphasized rather than distracted from her ample bosom. "I'm working."

She  _wasn't_  working: she was lallygagging. But Quark didn't correct her. He was interested to see how the Doctor would take this tacit rejection of his invitation. To Quark's disappointment, he shrugged indifferently.

"Whatever you like," he said again. He certainly was in an accommodating mood.

"There are still a few things we need to talk about," Leeta added with a sidelong glance at Quark. "Privately. The Rite of Separation doesn't cover everything, you know."

Quark rolled his eyes and busied himself with tidying up the counter. If they were going to start petting one another and making goggly eyes again, he was done. For a year the two of them had meandered around the Promenade arm-in-arm, gazing out at the Wormhole like it didn't open half a dozen times a day, or sitting with ankles and fingers entwined on the second level of the bar, gazing  _deeply_  into one another's eyes. Even on the way to Risa, preparing to end their relationship, they'd been nauseatingly affectionate.

But Bashir's words surprised him. "I don't really think that's necessary, do you?" he said dismissively. "As far as I'm concerned, the matter's closed. Better just to move on."

Quark glanced up without raising his head, noting the stunned hurt that spread across Leeta's pretty face. "If that's the way you feel about it…" she said fragilely, her lower lip quivering for a moment before she made it go still.

"Why don't you get back to the dabo wheel?" Quark suggested. There were no customers who seemed interested in taking a spin, but Leeta looked like she could use an excuse to get away. He was impressed by Doctor Bashir's casual frostiness — what did the girl expect, really, after what she'd told him moments after dumping him? — but that didn't mean Quark was heartless. She was hurt. "Your break's not for another half an hour, you know."

"All right," Leeta said stiffly. She cast Bashir another wounded look, but he didn't seem to notice. He was staring past Quark at the traffic on the Promenade.

As Leeta flounced off, trying to look unaffected, Quark leaned in, draping a forearm over the bar.

"You can be as cold as a helium comet, Doctor," he murmured, impressed. "I ever told you that?"

Bashir blinked at him again, an unsettlingly deliberate movement. He shrugged. "I'd have thought you'd understand," he said.

"Oh, I definitely understand," said Quark, nodding sagely. "I just thought you'd be more…  _diplomatic_  about it."

"What'll diplomacy get me but an awkward dinner and a conversation I don't really need to have?" asked Bashir.

Quark reached up to brush a finger along his earlobe, fascinated. "Good for you, Doctor," he said sincerely. "You can't let females push you around like that. She wanted something else, so she moved on: letting her come back whenever she likes isn't good for either of you."

He'd half-hoped Bashir might agree with him, so that they could bond for a moment over the fickleness of women. Even annoyance or disgust would have been amusing: Quark liked getting under the  _hew-mons'_  skin because it made surprisingly easy sport. But the Doctor only looked at him dryly, and said, "What about that karvino juice?"

Quark shook his head with a chagrined little hiss. Julian was a man who knew what he wanted: he'd give him that. "Whatever you like," he agreed, tossing the Doctor's own platitude back at him as he moved to the correct shelf.

The comm system chirped overhead. "Commander Worf to Doctor Bashir," the Klingon's stern voice called.

"Bashir here," said the Doctor.

Quark hurriedly poured the drink. Once it was in the glass, after all, he could charge for it whether it was consumed or not. He sat it down in front of the officer as Worf delivered his orders.

"Report to the  _Defiant_ immediately. We are departing in eight minutes."

"Eight minutes?" Bashir echoed, frowning.

"Eight minutes," Worf confirmed, in that tone that meant he would brook no argument.

"On my way," the Doctor said, climbing to his feet. "Bashir out."

"Ah-ah, Doctor!" Quark sang out as the man started for the door. When he looked back, Quark waggled one of his billing pads and nodded at the untouched glass of cerulean fluid. "The juice?"

Bashir forced a thin smile. "Of course," he said. He backtracked two steps and reached to press his thumb to the scanner. Then he started off again.

The device squawked indignantly, and Quark looked down at it. In the complex geometric cuneiform of his homeworld, he read the alert:  _error,_   _incomplete print match._ He frowned. "Doctor? It didn't get a good reading," he said, puzzled. "Are your hands wet?"

Bashir doubled back again, glancing down at his hand and chafing his thumb against the other fingers. Then he made a show of wiping it on the front of his uniform. "Must be," he said. He reached out for the pad again, this time lingering until the device made its usual happy beep. "All right?" he asked Quark.

"Perfect," Quark said with his favourite covetous grin. Another four slips of latinum, billed to Starfleet. And the drink hadn't even been touched. "Do come again!"

"You can count on it," Bashir said cheerfully. Then he strode off, brisk and efficient. Morn watched him go, then looked dolefully at Quark and shrugged his shoulders.

"I know," Quark agreed. "Eight minutes' notice that the  _Defiant_ 's leaving the station? Either there's something exciting going on upstairs, or they just forgot they might need a doctor wherever they're headed."

Morn cast his eyes heavenward to show what he thought of that. Quark was just bracing for another endless anecdote about the Lurian's vast family, probably as concerned a rapid departure from somewhere or other, when Morn picked up his glass again and took a long, savouring swig.

Quark turned his attention back to the pad, still puzzled by the faulty reading. The first print was saved in short-term memory, and he called it up. The billing program had tried to match it, but had found too few points of comparison for a positive result.  _Closest available match, Doctor Julian Bashir, 68%_ , it read. One of the whorls looked muddy, almost smudged. Or melted. Quark shrugged and flipped over the device, whacking it on the edge of the counter. The Doctor's hand must have been wet. Moisture wasn't supposed to affect the integrity of the scan, but his invoice pads were getting more and more unreliable. He couldn't afford to replace them, and he had to hope this wouldn't become a routine problem. Starfleet insisted on accurate identification on its bills: a 96% match or better. At least the Doctor had forgotten to cancel his holosuite reservation: now the house could double-book the time slot.

Frustrated and once again anxious about his precarious finances, Quark stowed the device and started wrathfully wiping down the bar. A shadow fell across it, curvaceous and bubble-headed. Leeta again.

"I can't believe he said that," she said, puckering her full lips into an injured pout. It was a caricature of an expression, but the hurt in her eyes was very real. "That he didn't see the point in talking with me? It's not like Julian to brush me off like that."

" _Wasn't_  like Julian, you mean," said Quark briskly. It would be easier on her in the long run if she heard the truth now and learned to accept it. "But come on: after the way you left things, you can't expect him to want to spend time with you!"

Leeta's shoulders slumped, deepening the cleft of her cleavage. Quark let himself enjoy the view. She seemed to be immune to his charms, but she never complained about a roving eye. It was another thing that made her such a valuable employee. Just as well she'd ended things with the good Doctor: Quark wouldn't have wanted to lose her to the easy life of an officer's wife.

"I thought we did it all so amicably," she mourned.

"Sure," Quark agreed. "And then you kicked him in the teeth. Look at him, Leeta: he's an intelligent man, a  _doctor._ He's got an important job, a valuable commission, he's not bad looking by  _hew-mon_  standards. How'd you think it made him feel to find out you'd dumped him for  _Rom_? While I'm impressed by the bait-and-switch, you've got to admit it was a blow to his pride."

The fact she hadn't even made an attempt to initiate anything with his inept brother probably wasn't much of a comfort to Bashir, either. She hadn't just dumped him for a lesser man, but for the  _fantasy_  of a lesser man.

Leeta was frowning sadly. "I guess I never thought of it that way," she said. She glanced at the door, even though Bashir was long gone. "But I thought at least he'd want to get his…"

Her voice trailed off and her eyes grew wide with dismay. Her mouth popped shut and she tossed her head at Quark. "You can stop looking so smug," she said, turning on one tall heel and sauntering back towards the dabo table, hips swaying. "I didn't want to meet him for a drink anyway!"

Quark scoffed quietly, turning back to attend Morn's once more empty glass. "Whatever you like," he muttered.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	36. Manhandled

_Note: Apologies in advance for torturing the Irony Monkey. What can I say? Sloan's methods are unconscionable, and that does not get adequately discussed._

**Part VII, Act I: Manhandled**

From out of a drunken dream of darkness, Julian awoke with a start. As he sucked in a gasp of cold air, a hard, calloused palm clamped down over his mouth. Thumb and forefinger pinched off his nose, and suddenly he could not breathe.

His vision was blurred, and in the moment of insensible panic he could not make his eyes focus. He tried instinctively to cry out, but his throat was dry and his lips were sealed and he managed only a muffled moan. Cold breath, smelling sourly of thiamine and rancid oil, gusted over his left cheek and whistled in his ear as his assailant leaned close.

"Not a sound, Doctor," Enabran Tain whispered. "It wouldn't take much to wake the others, and you don't want them to see us like  _this_ , now do you?"

Julian lay very still, his heart hammering at sixty-five beats per minute. He tried to slow it, knowing he'd run out of air more rapidly if he did not. He couldn't do it: he was far too weak to modulate his vital signs. He was too weak to fight off the Cardassian, too. Worse, the pressure on his jaw and teeth was causing ripples of pain to spider out into his broken zygoma. They were just warning shots for now, like the tectonic tremors that presaged a massive volcanic eruption, but although it shamed him to admit it, he feared the pain. There had been too much pain already, and he knew there was more to come. He didn't need to have Enabran Tain seek it out.

"You're going to tell me what you took and where you got it," Tain hissed, leaning so close now that he could have licked Julian's ear without stretching his neck. A shudder of revulsion joined the low, baseline shivering that was his body's feeble defence against the deep chill of orbital night. He wanted to pull back so that he could writhe away from the old man, but the knowledge of his fractured scapula prevented him. Now, the pain was almost bearable. If he moved or struggled, it would explode again.

Tain's other hand was below, clamped around Julian's right wrist so that his one useable hand was immobilized. In his current weakened state, he was easily restrained. And he was running out of air: his lungs were burning, and his mouth kept trying to suck in something breathable agains the seal of the Cardassian's palm.

"I'll allow you three breaths," Tain informed him pleasantly. "Use them wisely, Doctor: tell me what I want to know."

The pincers on his nostrils released, and the hand withdrew from his mouth. Julian gulped in twin lungfuls of air, ignoring the ache in his bruised ribs and the fire in his back as he did so. He blinked wildly to clear his vision, and forced himself to focus on the serenely grinning face floating above him. He took another breath, this one more steadying. Then he sucked in a third.

Instantly, the hand was back, more forceful than before. When his nostrils were pinched this time, Julian could smell blood. Enabran Tain looked down at him with almost paternal disappointment.

"I did try to warn you, Doctor," he said. "Three breaths. You wasted them."

 _Wasted them trying to breathe!_  Julian's mind protested. Something of his angry indignity must have shown in his eyes, because Tain's shoulders shook with a silent chuckle. "You'll get another chance," he murmured. "I don't plan on suffocating you tonight. I just want you to learn that I mean what I say."

He leaned near again, so that he did not need to put any force at all into the words he poured directly into Julian's auditory canal. "Miraculously able-bodied for the count, and ground back to uselessness again after the meal," he murmured. "You took something: a drug. Tell me what it was and how you obtained it. I'll give you two breaths this time. Fail me again, and you'll only get one."

Julian's mind, embodied as it was in a brain that had been recently rattled around his skull like a marble in a gourd, was not quite adroit enough to concoct a convincing story while battling the need for air. He focused his wits on controlling his diaphragm so that when Tain withdrew his hand again, Julian took a slow, deep, steady breath, making the best use of his limited allotment. And then, more lucid, he decided that the closer he kept to the truth, the better.

"It's a stimulant," he said, speaking rapidly in the hope that if what he said now was compelling enough, Tain wouldn't cut him off again once he took a second breath. "A dental implant. I'm supposed to use it if I'm captured and interrogated. It gives—" He was out of air, and he had to draw in more. He froze, expecting the palm to descend again.

Instead, Tain tilted his head and smiled. "Go  _on_ ," he purred.

"It gives a brief burst of energy and pain-suppression," said Julian. "It's supposed to give an officer an opportunity to escape, or to get somewhere they can call for help."

"Or procure the means to kill themselves?" asked Tain.

Julian was warming into his story. It wasn't so different from what he did in the holosuite, really. Julian Bashir, Secret Agent was a master prevaricator. The stakes were higher here, but the principle was the same: commit to the yarn. His left eye narrowed. The right couldn't, really. The swelling around his eye socket was less now than it had been, but he still couldn't open the eye more than five millimetres. At least he was now quite certain his vision had not been compromised by the fracture.

"Starfleet doesn't ask that of its people," he said coldly.

Tain laughed, a noiseless susurration of mirth that chilled Julian's fevered blood. "Of  _course_  they don't," he mocked. Then he leaned in again, far, far too close for comfort. "And they don't give their personnel dental implants to guard against torture, either, Doctor. You're not talking to some doddering Gul, you know. I know more about Starfleet Intelligence and their methods than you can imagine… and  _much_  more than you know yourself."

Julian's empty stomach flopped. That was probably true. But then again…

"You quite likely do," he whispered. "But you've been out of contact for almost two years, Tain. Things have changed. The war with the Klingons, the rising threat of the Dominion… Starfleet's had to implement new policies."

Tain considered this. For what seemed like an eternity he hovered there, tightly clamped fingers digging into the sinews of Julian's wrist while his other hand lay curled just under the human's chin, ready to muffle his mouth or grab him by the throat — or, Julian thought darkly, to dig a thumb into his broken cheek. He tried to keep that fear from flashing through his eyes, and maintained a steady gaze. He resisted the urge to keep talking. Silence was more believable than the most elaborate lie.

"And why would they  _implement_  this policy for medical personnel?" Tain asked at last, thoughtful. "Surely a doctor isn't at a significant risk for capture and interrogation."

"I'm not just a doctor," said Julian. "I'm Chief Medical Officer at one of the most strategically important outposts in the Quadrant. As for being at risk of capture and interrogation, the Dominion thought I was worth capturing — and  _you're_  interrogating me right now."

Tain's eyes widened in momentary surprise, and he laughed again. This time, it was actually an audible chuckle. "I see why Garak likes you, Doctor. You're a very witty man. And you're impudent. Garak always was drawn to impudence." He planted his hand across Julian's forehead, then withdrew it and chafed his fingers together. "Is Garak aware of just how warm your skin is? It's fascinating."

This non sequitur caught Julian off-guard. "I'm running a fever," he said, before he could think that maybe this was something he'd rather Enabran Tain didn't know.

"Hmm." Tain twisted his lips in lazy disdain. Then he fixed gleaming eyes on his subject again. "So it's a dental implant. What's the drug?"

Julian thought about trying to bluff. But he couldn't think of another medication that had all the characteristics of this one, and he didn't know if Tain knew enough about Federation pharmacology to recognize a disparity between properties and symptoms. He gave a small, painful shake of his head. "I can't tell you that," he said. "It's classified. Federation medical secrets."

There was a twist of amusement in his voice and in his heart as he said those words. He remembered the first time he'd uttered them, shambling eagerly from level to level in Ops like a child on a playground apparatus, carried away with the excitement of his first posting and the thrill of wild speculation.  _What do you think he might want from_ you _, Julian_ , Jadzia had asked, teasing lightly. He had been startled and fascinated by the question.  _I don't know… Federation medical secrets? Rest assured, they're safe with me, Commander!_

 _I'm sure they are, Doctor Bashir_ , Sisko had said, almost too earnestly. He had never had fun at the expense of his brash and overly imaginative junior officer. Julian felt the tired urge to smile. Had he ever really been that young?

Tain sat back on his heels with a heavy grunt. The bruising grip on Julian's wrist released, and both the Cardassian's hands withdrew into his lap. "If you had told me what it was, I wouldn't have believed any of it," he said. "As it is, I'm still not convinced that Starfleet would resort to such strategies. You humans seem to regard your teeth as your own personal property."

Julian arched his eyebrows. Weren't they? But he wasn't going to let Tain goad him into protesting too much. "Believe me, or don't," he said tiredly. "I don't answer to you."

"Not yet," Tain sang, a low lilt of knowing hauteur that might have frightened Julian at a less overburdened time. The Cardassian hefted himself to his feet, gripping the nearby table for support. Once he was upright, he reached down to pat Julian's exposed left shoulder.

He had to have known how the simple, companionable gesture would hurt. It awoke the exhausted clusters of sensory nerves, and sent lightning arcs of pain down into Julian's arm. Every muscle on that side of his body seemed to clench protectively, which of course made the situation worse. Deeper, more pernicious bolts exploded from his scapula, lancing his heart and pulverizing his lung, and momentarily blinding him with misery. Julian's breath slithered out in a strained hiss of anguish, and he screwed his eyes tightly closed against sudden tears of pain.

"Ooh!" Tain made a noise of unconvincing contrition. "You'll have to forgive me, Doctor. Seems I'm growing forgetful in my old age. I  _do_  hope you have a pleasant night's sleep."

Julian heard him move off, but he was too far gone in pain to care. As he fought his rebellious body and felt its weakness and the slow, steady drain of the fever dragging him down, his last fragile, despairing thought was that he'd never be able to stand for the count today…

 _(fade_ )

He couldn't even sit up. Kalenna tried to help him, then called for Parvok. Finally, Martok nudged his way in and managed to lift Julian off of the thin pallet and turn him so that his feet were on the floor and the rail of the cot dug into the back of his lean thighs, but Julian couldn't maintain the position unassisted. If the others tried to withdraw their bracing arms, he swayed and started to sag. Finally, Kalenna tucked his arms so that his elbow was braced across his lap, and they helped him to curl forward, his brow just brushing his knees. It was a terrible, painful contortion for his ravaged back, and it stretched and strained the muscles around his damaged kidney. That whole section of his abdominal cavity had an inflamed, pulpy feeling to it now, and it was fast becoming the focal point for Julian's myriad miseries. He could feel the waves of heat rising from his body as he burned with fever. He was shivering again.

"He can't walk," Kalenna said, her voice quiet and very strained. "He'll never be able to stand for the count."

"Is there anything to be done to aid him?" Martok asked in a low, guarded way that made Julian wonder where Tain was. He couldn't lift his head to look. Even the shadows of his lap were blurred and indistinct. "Does  _he_ …"

There was a whisper of hair as Kalenna shook her head. "Parvok was with the military, not the Tal Shiar. I doubt we could convince any other operatives to give up their own doses for anyone, much less a Starfleet officer. And there is no time."

"We have to bring him out with us," said Parvok. "If he's not missing for the count, at least he'll be the only one who's punished."

"Is that all you can think of, Romulan?" Martok growled. "What his condition will cost  _you_?"

Julian wanted to speak up in the man's defence, and to tell the General that if there was any way he could prevent others from suffering for his failings, he had to do it. But he couldn't find his voice.

"The Sub-Lieutenant is correct," Kalenna said tightly. The words clearly cost her, but Julian felt a wave of gratitude as she explained. "You have seen how he protects those around him — even at great personal cost. He is not a man who would allow others to pay for his weakness."

Martok growled. " _Weakness_?" he spat contemptuously.

"Physical weakness," said Kalenna, enunciating to emphasize the distinction. "It is no criticism, General: only the cold truth."

The warrior hissed in disgust. "Perhaps if  _he_  would keep his opinions to himself, I would be less inclined to look for insults where none exist. Whatever we are going to do, we must do it now."

"There's only one think we can do," said Parvok. "You said yourself that they want him alive for some reason: if that's true, they won't kill him for failing to stand. But if he fails to appear at all, other people  _are_  going to die. We've all seen it before."

Julian hadn't. He was afraid to ask for details. He hated that he was afraid, but he couldn't help it. His cheekbone throbbed, ill-adapted to a position that significantly increased bloodflow to the head. His brain, at least, seemed appreciative. The fog of concussion seemed thinner, and his higher reasoning skills were returning. The cube root of 5976, to six significant digits, was 18.1469.

Someone was bending over him. He hoped whoever it was, they wouldn't touch him. Right now his pains had found a sort of equilibrium. Any additional sensory burden might upset that.

They didn't touch him. It was Kalenna. She said quietly, "Doctor? Are you listening? What do you want to do?"

"I have to go out," Julian said, forcing the words past his throat before the physician part of his mind protested. What he needed, absent the potential for any actual medical treatment, was strict bed rest. A patient in his condition in his own Infirmary — assuming for some unimaginable reason he couldn't simply  _treat_  them — wouldn't even have been allowed bed-to-chair transfers or a trip to the toilet, much less be made to get up and walk twenty metres to try to stand at attention for an hour and a half.

But what choice did he have? Surely that was the point of such a prison: to rob the inmates of choices, autonomy, the dignity that came from feeling empowered to control their own bodies? At least, Julian imagined that was what the Dominion wanted. Starfleet prisoner of war camps were different: secure but comfortable, clean, with the needs of the captives adequately met. Denying food, water, sleep, hygiene or medical care to anyone, even enemy combatants, was antithetical to the founding principles of the Federation. It was unimaginable that Starfleet officers would resort to such tactics.

Feelings of wounded moral superiority weren't going to help him get through this next ordeal. Julian closed his right hand on his kneecap and slowly, agonizingly, pushed himself up into an approximation of a sitting position. His scapula ground painfully, and he thought he would faint — or vomit. But he didn't. He blinked up at the others: Kalenna, at his side, Martok looming above, Parvok hanging back a couple of paces. The Breen was standing by the door, exiled from this conversation as they were from all the others. There was no sign of Tain.

"The doors are open already?" Julian rasped. He hadn't realized he had so little time.

Kalenna glanced at Martok, and nodded. She seemed to want to say something, but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. Her eyes flicked to the cot, its pillow askew and the ill-smelling blanket in disarray. Julian understood.

"We need to make the bed," he murmured.

"Yes," Kalenna said. Now it was she who sounded hoarse.

Julian held out his good arm to Martok. "General, can you help me?" he asked.

Martok's expression hardened resolutely. "Gladly, Doctor," he said. He gripped Julian's forearm with is right hand, and slipped the left into his armpit. Julian took a firm, hasty hold just above the Klingon's bracer, determined to do as much of the lifting as he was able in the hope of sparing too much strain on the other man's healing elbow.

It was a noble thought, but he didn't have the strength to act on it. When he tried to pull himself up of his own accord, his muscles tensed painfully and his body strained, but he did no more than rock feebly against the rail of the cot. For a second it seemed that he would not move at all, but then Martok exerted the necessary force and Julian was drawn up onto quaking legs. He swayed perilously, his head swimming with the sudden change in altitude, and Martok closed the distance between them. Julian was clinging to his arm like a drowning swimmer might cling to a rock, and his head dropped down to rest heavily against Martok's armoured shoulder. The hand under his arm slipped around to grip his back, well below the plane of the outraged shoulder-blade. Julian's body wanted to sink to the floor, but the warrior would not let him fall.

The roar in his ears subsided as the peril of unconsciousness passed, and Julian found himself still upright, chiefly by virtue of the larger man's firm grasp. The edge of the wing-like shoulder plate was digging into his brow, and Julian slowly eased the weight of his pendulous head back onto his own neck.

Something brushed the back of his calf: Kalenna was leaning in to straighten the flat, striped pillow on the cot. She moved swiftly to shake out the blanket.

"Can you walk?" Martok asked. "I will assist you."

"I can try," breathed Julian. He was desperate for a mouthful of water, but he didn't quite dare to ask for one. It might just come up again, if not here then out in the atrium. He didn't know how much was left in his second bottle, either. For some reason, he couldn't quite learn to keep meticulous account of his ration. He knew his brain ought to be able to do it, but instead he kept losing track. Some part of him still took water for granted.

 _It's the part of you that's still free_ , a voice deep in his mind murmured. It reminded him of Major Kira.  _Hold onto that, Julian: don't reprimand it. It's important._

At the moment, he couldn't quite see why. Martok was turning now, guiding him towards the door. Julian's feet were sluggish and clumsy, catching against the floor and then stumbling forward to compensate. Parvok stepped hurriedly out of the way, into the corner by the head of Kalenna's cot.

They were halfway to the exit when the door flew open with a shriek and a  _bang_. Julian's whole body jolted as if with an electric shock, his overtaxed nerves too tightly strung to suppress a brutal startle reflex. Martok's hold on him tightened in response, refusing to let him fall. The Klingon went very still, and it was only then that Julian realized it was not Tain, returning from the waste reclamation room, who had opened the door. Three Jem'Hadar soldiers were striding militantly across the threshold, deploying themselves in a tight delta formation in the middle of the room. The Second, whose handiwork Julian had been enjoying for the last three days, was in the lead.

Parvok was trying to press himself as far into the corner as he could. The Breen stood like a statue just inside the door: they hadn't even stepped back when the Jem'Hadar brushed past. Behind him, Julian could feel that Kalenna had gone very still. Invasions of the barracks by the guards were rare, apart from the largely unwitnessed morning inspection. Julian's first coherent thought was horrifying.

_The power drain. They've noticed it. They ran a diagnostic, and saw the anomalous fluctuations, and now…_

The Second curled his lip contemptuously. " _He_ ," he spat, jerking his spiny head at Julian; "is to come with us."

He levelled his plasma rifle at General Martok's heart. "Step aside, Klingon," he commanded.

Julian felt Martok's chest swell with defiant pride. "No," he said boldly, as if speaking before the High Council itself. The single syllable filled the narrow room.

The Second stepped forward, a sidling, combative movement that was more a swaying of the hips than a proper stride. He leaned in over his weapon and bared his teeth. "The First wishes to keep you alive, Klingon," he sneered. "He sees tactical value in having the men defeat you time and again, even now that you are feeble and useless. I do not share his interest in your species. I will not hesitate to end your wretched life if you defy me."

"End it, then, and do not toy with me," Martok declaimed. "But I will not yield this man to your mercies."

The Second smiled slowly, looking more than ever like a monster out of the kind of books Julian had devoured in his preteen years. "If this is too  _honourable_ , Klingon, I can think of some more fitting end for you. Vented into space, perhaps? I am told it is a most… undignified way to die."

Martok's expression did not change, but Julian felt him stiffen. He had a vague idea that the honour or dishonour of a Klingon's death had grave ramifications for their descendants, much like other forms of disgrace. In any case, he was not about to let any of his cellmates take his place: he was the one who had earned the displeasure of the Vorta, and he was the one who should face the consequences of that recklessness.

"Do what you must," growled Martok. "But I will not surrender him."

Julian forced his aching fingers to release their hold on Martok's arm. "General, let me go," he said quietly. He wished the words were steadier, but it was all that he could manage. Trying to swallow his terror and to master his legs, he took a tottering half-step away from the support of the warrior's solid body. Almost at once he felt his knees buckling.

He didn't fall. The Second seized him by the elbow — thankfully, the right one — and spun around to fling Julian at the nearest of his subordinates. Julian stumbled, toppling forward, but the guard had a hold on him and he was not allowed to crash to the floor. The other one was swooping in now, grabbing him from the other side. The clamped hand that closed upon his left humerus jarred the bone and jostled everything attached to it. Julian's lips parted in a noiseless gasp of agony.

He was only peripherally aware of the way they manhandled him, turning him and shaking him between them as he hung limp between them. All the strength was gone from his legs, and his knees were made of rubber. He made a brief, painful effort to scramble along between them as they started to drag him through the door, but he couldn't do it. He caught a glimpse of Parvok's ashen face, eyes wild with horror, and then they were out in the corridor, turning sharply towards the atrium.

 _But what about the count?_  Julian thought wildly.  _The count…_

Something hard and cylindrical jabbed him in the small of the back, just to the right of his spine. The sharp little frisson of pain startled him, and he was so thankful it hadn't struck him on the left.

He must have spoken aloud.

"You have been excused from the count," the Second said with grim relish. They were the last words Julian could make sense of for some time after that.

 _(fade_ )

The journey seemed to last an eternity. He was semiconscious, kept from welcoming oblivion by the sudden, sharp bursts of fresh and unexpected pain. If any of his injuries had simply put forth a steady, constant protest of agony, Julian thought it would have overwhelmed him. But none of them did. He was jerked in one direction, then the other, first stretching then compressing the fracture in his scapula. Just when he started to grow accustomed to that rhythm, his head would bob as the guards altered course, and the knot of his jaw would bounce off his collarbone: blinding anguish flared through his face. His dangling, dragging legs were a leaden weight pulling on his torso, tractioning his lumbar spine and stretching the abused musculature of his flank. And his right knee hurt, too, which seemed patently unfair. It had been improving, and now it hurt again. Julian resented that.

He heard a distant crackle that he felt sure he should be able to identify, and then his whole body stiffened at the squalling  _clang_  of another door. Someone spoke, but he couldn't make out the words or even identify the voice. Rough hands seized his ankles, and suddenly his legs were drawn up behind him and his head and shoulders tipped forward. They laid him roughly on his stomach, across a hard, ridged, and bitterly cold surface that seemed to burn him even through the layers of his uniform. His right temple hit the grill beneath him before the rest of his head, sparing his cheekbone from the worst of the impact. There, at least, the chill was welcome. After the first flare of sensory protestation, he felt the inflamed tissue grow slowly numb.

The door opened again, and this time Julian could understand the words.

"You are dismissed," a woman said, coolly disdainful. "My own men will attend this prisoner. Return to your other duties."

"Yes, Vorta!" the Second said crisply. His voice had a defensive note to it that told Julian he wasn't happy with this order. But the door shrieked again, and there was silence.

No, not quite silence. Under the low hiss of the life support system that circulated the dry and pitilessly cold air through the prison, he could hear the hum and whistle of microprocessors and isolinear circuitry. It was the sound of a computer terminal: a powerful and complex one. The only such terminal he had seen in this place was in Deyos's office. Julian tried to open his eyes, so that he could confirm his location. It required entirely too much effort: he couldn't do it.

He was aware that his breathing was shallow and ragged. The pain was settling into a new configuration, now that he was horizontal again and no one was tugging on his broken bones. He felt the almost irresistible draw of unconsciousness, like quicksand sucking at the limbs of a panicking man. He wanted so badly to float towards it, but his survival instincts would not let him.

He was in an unfamiliar situation in an unconfirmed location. There was a stranger in the room with him. A woman, presumably a Vorta. The Vorta doctor? Ikat'ika had said she would arrive in twenty hours. That had been… Julian didn't know. A long time ago. The Dominion Standard Day shouldn't have complicated his ability to track the passage of time, not this badly. But it was hard to do even simple math in this amphitheatre of pain his head had become. Roaring, jeering voices from a thousand tortured neurons clamoured for his attention.

He heard the crisp  _clack_  of shoes on the stone floor. It conjured up memories of Quark's: elegant dabo girls on improbably tall shoes, moving sylph-like through the swirls of warm colour. It made Julian think of Leeta. And it puzzled him.  _High heels_? he thought.  _A Vorta wearing high heels?_ It seemed so… impractical.

"What is this?" the woman said frigidly. She had made a full circuit around him now, and her voice stopped just off to port, an indeterminate distance above Julian's head. "Explain yourself."

He couldn't explain any of it. He didn't want to try. The Dominion was responsible for this: let her go to them for her explanations.

"It's the human," a rigid and subtly defensive voice answered. Julian felt himself relax a little as he realized that he wasn't expected to speak after all. She  _had_  been asking the Dominion — well, Deyos, anyhow. The commandant of the camp didn't seem very happy to be questioned, either.

"Your orders were very clear," the woman snapped. She sounded angry and disgusted. "The specimen was to be properly preserved until my arrival. The human was to be kept alive."

"He is alive," said Deyos. He was trying to sound dispassionate, but he wasn't quite succeeding. "He is insolent and disobedient. It was necessary to make an example of him. Order must be maintained in the camp."

 _He's afraid of her_ , Julian thought distantly. That was strangely satisfying.

"The camp is not my concern," said the woman frostily. "If you cannot maintain discipline and and obey higher directives at the same time, perhaps you are unfit for your position."

"There has never been any question of my fitness for my position!" Deyos yelped. "I have been engineered and trained for such duties, and I perform them with excellence. No other internment camp is as orderly as this one. No other Vorta has achieved such a record of sustained efficiency and security. And  _I_ am the one entrusted with the most difficult of prisoners. The captives from the Alpha Quadrant are known for their defiance and their stubbornness, and none of them are more stubborn than this human!"

He seemed to want to say more, but he had run out of arguments. Julian could hear him huffing and fuming. When the woman spoke again, her voice was laced with icy contempt.

"I do not care how stubborn he is," she said. "You were informed that I would be returning to perform further tests, and that he was to be kept in a fit state to be examined. Does this look like a fit state to you?"

"He was sedated the first time," said Deyos. "Just how fit do you really need him?"

 _The first time…_  Julian felt his heart shrivel to a stone in his chest. Was this Vorta the one who had overseen his abduction? Was she the one who had drugged him and dragged him across the Galaxy? The spectre of that lost span of time loomed up hauntingly before him. What had been done to him while he lay there, helpless and unaware? And what did his kidnappers want with him now?

The female Vorta hissed in cold disapproval, clearly disgusted by the question. "You will explain his state, at once."

"Later," said Deyos. "It's time for the count."

"I care nothing for your count!" said the woman sharply. Julian flinched involuntarily at her tone, regretting it at once as a dozen daggers of fresh anguish lanced through his limbs and his trunk and his head. When the Vorta spoke again, her tone was silken and perilous. "Your First can conduct the count today. You are needed here, to answer for your actions. For the glory of the Dominion."

"For the glory of the Dominion," Deyos echoed hollowly. Julian heard him move towards the door. Unctuously, he said; "I will just step out to inform the First—"

"Fifth Gorotok'ren!" said the woman. " _You_ will inform the First. And you will contact the vessel and have the invasive equipment beamed down again. It appears I will have to make some modifications to the specimen before I can evaluate him."

Panic seized Julian. Modifications? What did that mean? What the hell was she planning to do to him?

He stiffened, his left foot scrabbling for purchase against the ribbed surface under him. His right arm was pinned beneath him, and he had to roll to the left in order to free it. He found the edge of whatever he was lying on. It was a corner, rounded off where three planes met like the walls of a box. He gripped it, tried to lift himself, could not find the strength.

And a scaly hand clamped down on his wrist. Another closed on his hip, fingers digging around the crest of his pelvis. Two more seized his ankles.

"Lie still," the Vorta female said silkily, no compassion in her voice. There was no wrath, either, and Julian supposed he ought to be grateful for slender mercies. But his skin was crawling with horror and revulsion, and he still could not quite manage to open his eyes. He was functionally blind, completely at the mercy of the Jem'Hadar who held him and this woman who had snatched him away from his life. When a cold, uncannily smooth hand descended on his brow, pinning his head to the shelf beneath him, Julian felt a fissure of despair open up in his chest.

"Just lie still," the woman repeated. "You will suffer only as much as you cause yourself to suffer."

 _(fade_ )


	37. Unethical Practice

**Part VII, Act II: Unethical Practice**

Julian fought to open his eyes. It was such a small task, but getting even these parchment-thin muscles to obey him took a sophistication of coordinated effort that was almost beyond the reach of his pain-addled and panic-ridden faculties. The weight of the Vorta's palm on his face was far more oppressive than the force she exerted should have suggested. Her hand and fingers were very rigid, the tips not even touching his skin. It was a position meant only to restrain, not to support or to reassure. As she leaned back, reaching for something with her other hand, even less of her skin touched his. He had the impression that she would have withdrawn even that cursory contact if she'd had other means of restraining him.

He recognized the chittering beep of a Dominion medical scanner: it sounded exactly like the one he had used on the Eighth. It drew close to his ear, and then travelled away, moving towards his hip.

"What did you do?" the woman said contemptuously. Tiellyn, Julian reminded himself. Deyos had called her Tiellyn. "Have the Jem'Hadar form a circle and kick him around like a sack of grain? He has a fractured zygoma, three cracked ribs… ooh, and  _how_  did you manage this? A broken scapula. That's unusual." Her tone had changed to one of morbid fascination. It hardened again to scorn as she added; "I know he wasn't in a shuttle crash, because  _you_  don't have a ship!"

The choked noise of indignation must have come from Deyos. Again, Julian fought to open his eyes. His terror was dulled just a little by curiosity. He wanted to see the woman who could tear down the cruel-eyed commandant so easily.

"He was promised an opportunity to perform in the ring, and he was given one," Deyos said stiffly. "He proved… difficult to subdue. The damage to the Eighth's Ketracel White port was his handiwork. The Second disciplined him accordingly."

The scanner stopped whirring. There was a  _clack_  as it was set down near Julian's hip. The pressure on his brow increased as the woman leaned in close to him, and her other hand took hold of the back of his neck.

"Open your eyes," she hissed, imperious and strangely seductive.

Julian had been trying to do just that, of course, but the command made him abandon his efforts. He didn't see any reason to cooperate with her, and he certainly had no intention of  _obeying_  her.

This time, the words were almost a purr. "Open your eyes, human, or I will have the Jem'Hadar peel them off with his fingernails."

The hand gripping Julian's pelvis dug further into his flesh. He could feel the talon-like nails even through the cloth of his uniform. The pressure on the soft flesh of his lower abdomen sent a tremor of electric warning up into his battered flank. Fighting his fear, not wanting it to show in his eyes, he forced his lids to obey him. The left one bore up well. The right complied as far as it was able.

She was three centimetres from his face, eclipsing his vision with pale skin and chiselled, patrician features and startlingly silver eyes. Her lips curled into a slow smile. They were stained a rich maroon, glossy with a cosmetic that smelled faintly of coconuts. Her eyelids were brushed with iridescent powder of a twilight purple hue. From the upper crests of her ribbed ears dangled long, fringed earrings set with small sapphires. In other circumstances or some other place, Julian might have thought her beautiful. Here, her elegant efforts were uncanny and horrifying.

" _You_  removed the Eighth's White port?" she asked, her lips working more forcefully than necessary. "In the combat ring? Prisoners are not given weapons in the combat ring."

Her eyes narrowed, blazing with sudden anger. She glanced away from Julian, firing twin torpedoes of admonition back over her shoulder.

"I did not give him weapons!" Deyos protested, defensive in the face of the unspoken accusation. "He did it with his hands."

The head made far too large by proximity pivoted back to Julian. Her hair was piled on her head in elaborate coils that would have made a Bajoran hairdresser jealous. She curled her lip in an imitation of amusement. "The Ketracel White ports," she said, rolling each syllable luxuriantly; "are not meant to be removed by hand. It was a very neat job, too. You could have shredded his jugular vein, but the freshly regenerated tissue shows a precise extraction. Bare-handed surgery,  _Doctor?_ And in the ring, at that."

Julian couldn't tell if she was suspicious or admiring, but the cool disdain with which Tiellyn spoke his title made his insides writhe. She had done what Deyos could not; what even the mirror-Odo in the alternate universe had failed to do. She had made of that honourable word an insult, a slur meant to debase him. He felt the mortification only for a moment, before his pride surged up again to remind him that he  _was_ a doctor, and that it was not something of which he should be ashamed. But he felt it.

"Very impressive," mused the woman. "And positively perverse. I knew you had a history with the Jem'Hadar,  _Doctor_. I did not expect you to exhibit sufficient ingenuity to apply the knowledge gleaned from your studies to such a bloody end. Fascinating."

Surely she could not know how those words smote his heart. Julian shut his eyes again, this time to restrain a hot wave of misery. That was exactly what he had done, and the steps he'd later taken to repair the mutilation weighed light against the breaking of his oath.

"I assume the unfortunate Eighth was his first opponent, and your Second incapacitated him?" Tiellyn said, straightening up. Julian blinked away the threat of a tear and tracked her as she stepped back and withdrew her hands from his head and throat. She chafed her fingers against her palms, and looked at them in mild disgust. "Always so filthy, these Alpha Quadrant creatures," she observed. "And this one's only been here twelve days!"

Julian felt suddenly very weary. Twelve days. It felt like an eternity. It was a little longer than that by the Bajoran calendar, of course, but that didn't account for it. He didn't feel like he'd been here for two weeks, but for ten thousand years.

The Vorta picked up the scanner, and picked up where she had left off: at Julian's scapula. "Are you going to answer my question, or not?" she demanded.

He didn't understand what she meant.

"The Eighth was his second opponent," said Deyos uncomfortably. "He wore out the first one. They danced around for twenty minutes. The human is very fast: my man could hardly land a blow."

" _Really_ ," said Tiellyn, in a sceptical tone of voice that was as eloquent as if she had called the other Vorta a liar outright. "The humans in Internment Camp 253 all proved very easy to subdue."

Suddenly, Julian's exhaustion dissolved. He was almost able to forget the pain. Other humans, in another camp? He thought of the Starfleet ships that had vanished in the Gamma Quadrant in the last three years. The  _Maryland_. The  _Sarajevo_. The  _Proxima_. His retinas burned with the memory of the glare as the  _Odyssey_ exploded: a Galaxy Class starship reduced to shrapnel in a matter of seconds. There had been no survivors; no time to abandon ship. If not for Jadzia's thinly-veiled insolence in goading Captain Keogh into off-loading all non-essential personnel before departing Deep Space Nine, the death toll would have been ten times higher. Haunted by that spectacle, Julian had always assumed the other lost ships had met similar fates. Now it seemed he was mistaken.

"Brutality is easy. Strategy takes greater effort. Perhaps the garrison at Internment Camp 253 is not as skilled as mine," Deyos said with thinly-veiled contempt.

"Perhaps," said Tiellyn, in a tone that made it plain she was not swayed by this argument. "How many of your men  _did_  this human defeat? He's not very large, you know, for one of his species. Taller than the average, but scrawny."

She was talking about him as if he were a piece of meat, but Julian didn't care. He was hoping she would say more about the humans in the other camp. Instead, she moved the scanner down the length of his body, and stopped where he had known she would, midway between his twelfth rib and the crest of his pelvis, where his insides felt pulverized to liquid.

"He won two matches," Deyos said sullenly. "The first by attrition, the second by… well, you saw what he did to Talak'ran. The Second made short work of him. The whole thing took less than an hour."

It had actually been seventy-five minutes. But then, maybe the Vorta wasn't counting the time Julian had spent sealing the wound in the Eighth's neck. He wondered if the female Vorta had been appraised of that, and what she thought of it if she knew.

"Well!" she said crisply, stepping sideways and continuing the scan down the length of Julian's legs. "You are fortunate that I was eager to return, Deyos. Or you might have been forced to deliver me a dead specimen after all. Where is Fifth Gorotok'ren?" she demanded, glaring over Julian in the direction of the Jem'Hadar restraining him.

"I will go and seek him, Vorta," one of them said gravely.

Just then, however, the door shrieked open. The noise startled Julian, and he bit down on a hiccoughing hiss of pain as his body tensed. Tiellyn made a sound that was almost a chuckle of irony.

"There you are," she said. "Bring it around and prepare to assist me."

"I can assist you," Deyos said, silkily obsequious. "I am responsible for the routine repairs to the Jem'Hadar in my unit, after all. You have seen my handiwork yourself. I am surely more experienced than any Fifth."

"Not  _my_  Fifth," said Tiellyn frostily. "Stay where you are, jailor, and be grateful I allow you to observe at all."

Julian might have taken a perverse pleasure in hearing Deyos thus rebuffed, but he was thinking about something else.  _You have seen my handiwork yourself_ , the commandant had said. Did that mean he was indeed taking the credit for the extemporaneous repair to Talak'ran's neck? More importantly, did that make Julian's own position safer or more perilous? If Tiellyn thought him too gifted, that could be dangerous. If she thought him worthless, the same might be true.

"Laser scalpel," she said in a dispassionate tone, handing off the scanner to the Fifth. He had brought a wheeled instrument cart around to the front of the makeshift table — Julian now thought he was lying on three cubic crates pushed together. He opened the top of the cart, unfolding it like a tackle box to reveal trays of surgical tools. Julian didn't recognize most of the designs, but it was obvious that this was a far more comprehensive collection than what Deyos had in his medkit.

Tiellyn took the device handed her by the Fifth, and she held it up before her, depressing the main button so that a thin column of purple light glowed from the tip, five centimetres long and about a millimetre wide. Julian's mouth went dry as she began to adjust the settings. Surely she didn't mean to cut him open here, like this? The room wasn't sterile. He was still fully clothed. He was unwashed, stewing in his own bacteria. He didn't see a delta wave inhibitor, no one had given him a sedative, surely,  _surely…_

She lowered the scalpel into the hollow of his shoulder, where his left arm was bound to his side by the strips of torn blanket. "Hold still," she advised dispassionately. "You don't want to lose a sleeve: it's cold in this place."

As Julian strained his eyes to watch without tucking his chin, she activated the laser again and drew it smoothly down the length of his humerus. There was a faint reek of singed fibres as a dark fissure appeared in the cloth. She pulled back the tool as she passed the last wrapping, and then handed it back to the Fifth.

Julian felt the comforting pressure of the dressing release, and the weight of his arm shifted subtly forward, awakening the pain in his scapula and trapezius. Using only the tips of her fingers and thumbs, Tiellyn flung back the ruined strips of dirty cloth. She had done very careful work: the sleeve of his uniform was not even nicked. She frowned when she saw the sling beneath, and reached for the knot where it lay against his collarbone. She made a cursory attempt to untie it, then snorted in disgust and held out her hand for the scalpel again. She sheered away the knot and flung back the two corners, removing the last support for Julian's arm. He ground his back teeth together against the stretching misery in his back, but that only sent a sharp jolt into his head.

Frustration, irrational and puerile, gripped him, and Julian had to fight the impulse to curse. He was sick of being in pain, damn it! It was senseless and horrible, and it was wearing on his patience as well as his will to fight on.

"Turn him on his front," Tiellyn instructed, seizing Julians wrist and yanking his forearm flush against his side. Between this, and the rough way the Jem'Hadar flipped him from his hip to his belly, he wasn't able to think much of anything for a few minutes.

 _(fade_ )

Osteogenic stimulators were not supposed to hurt.

Julian knew this. He'd used such a tool hundreds of times, probably thousands, on everything from children's green-stick fractures to bones shattered in critical inertial damper malfunctions. He had used them on sedated patients, people medicated into a twilight state, those under the influence of neural blocking agents or a mild emergency analgesic, and even once, on the Teplan homeworld, a little boy with a two-week-old break who had no pain relief at all. He'd even had them used on his own body by other hands, and he knew:  _they were not supposed to hurt!_

This one did. When the Vorta applied it to his shoulder-blade, working through all three layers of his uniform, the first thing he felt was a piercing column of warmth passing through skin and muscle and into the bone. That was the guiding laser, and the Federation tool produced much the same sensation: not painful by any means, but a little disconcerting if you didn't know what to expect. Then the pitch of the device's hum had changed, quickening and intensifying, and the pain had come.

It was a corrosive, burning, bubbling sensation deep under the muscle. Julian, lying with his left cheek pressed to the grate-like surface of the crate, two hard ridges bisecting his middle and two more digging into the front of his thighs where the boxes met, had not been able to stop the strangled moan of shocked misery that escaped his lips. His body tried to jerk away from it, too, but there was a Jem'Hadar at each limb now, holding him down like a battlefield casualty about to go under the saw of a Crimean War surgeon. He hadn't understood why that was necessary before, but he did now.

He felt the rippling, crawling seat of this new, unnatural anguish as it travelled over the bone. There was a sensation almost like a latch clicking into place somewhere deep within him, and then it was over. Gasping for air, his whole body limp with sudden relief, Julian lay shuddering and spent beneath the hard hands of the Jem'Hadar, involuntary tears trickling from his eyes to pool at the bridge of his nose and spill onto the crate beneath him.

 _Why did it hurt_? he wondered bewilderedly. And then another part of his mind countered,  _Why wouldn't it hurt_?

He didn't have much use for other varieties, but the history of medicine had always fascinated him. The development of a painless osteogenic stimulator had been a laborious and time-consuming project for Federation equipment engineers. As recently as the turn of the last century, it had been necessary to use a neural block even on sedated patients, not just to ease the pain of the fracture itself but to mitigate the agony of the treatment. Human bone was a living tissue, surrounded by delicate nerve clusters and sensitive musculature. The rapid regeneration caused by artificial stimulation of the osteoblasts disturbed the careful homeostasis surrounding a fracture, which elicited what was essentially a panic response in the nerves. The body interpreted that as pain.

In a fresh fracture, the patient's shock and the natural endorphins automatically released after significant trauma blunted such a response. In a fracture of a few weeks' old, the changes were less dramatic because callous formation had already completed and osteogenesis was well advanced. Assuming the fracture was well-aligned, and didn't need to be re-broken and properly set before healing, the pain of even a primitive osteogenic stimulator would be markedly less. In a situation like Julian's, with a three-day-old fracture, it made sense that it would be excruciating: old enough that the endorphins were spent long ago, but fresh enough that the regrowth was extensive and radical.

 _Lucky again_ , he thought sourly, steadying his breath as much as he could without being able to adjust his heart-rate with a thought. What he'd just been through was a cellular trauma. It had sapped him of still more of his strength, and he hadn't had much left going in.

"Step back," Tiellyn said coolly. The grip on Julian's elbow released. There was a  _clack_  as she set down the instrument. Then she planted her palm on Julian's shoulder-blade and pressed down firmly. Even understanding that the fracture was healed, he still expected pain. When it didn't come, he felt an almost giddy instant of gratitude.

"Move your arm," she instructed. "Touch the crown of your head.  _Do it_ , human," she hissed when he was slow to obey. "Or I will have my Third break every bone in your body so that I can have the pleasure of setting them."

The threat wasn't necessary: he wanted to know if his arm would move just as much as she did. Almost certainly more, in fact. He'd been shying away from the fear that if he didn't receive timely treatment, he might have permanently reduced function in that shoulder. Julian carefully navigated his arm away from his side, lifting it first and then stretching it. He swung it out in a broad arc, and had a moment's satisfaction when her heels clacked against the floor as she stepped out of the way. He flexed his elbow, extended it, rolled his wrist and wriggled his fingers, reached out ahead of him, and then finally cupped his hand to the back of his skull, fingertips feeling the rough crust of the scab where his scalp had been lacerated. It was warm to the touch, but he thought that was just the fever. It didn't feel inflamed or especially tender, so it probably wasn't infected.

"Very impressive," said Tiellyn sarcastically. "Now the face."

"No!" Julian cried reflexively. His first frantic thought was that he could not bear that boiling, caustic sensation in his cheekbone. The second, less cowardly and more rational, told him that he didn't want that laser of dubious quality too near his eye. The reason the Dominion device was painful and the Federation device was not was simple: the Dominion didn't care how much the therapy hurt. It followed that they might not care about other collateral damage. If that thing had not been tested near humanoid eyes, or if it  _had_  been tested and the results deemed unimportant, he did not want it anywhere near his face.

Her smooth hand curled around his wrist, yanking it back to his side under the protest of muscles sore after days of tensing against referred pain. The fingers of her other hand coiled about a fistful of hair, pressing him down against the crate so that its rough surface dug deeper into his left cheek. The scalp wound stung beneath her hand, and Julian's eye was forced closed as she increased the pressure still further.

She was leaning over him. He could feel the soft contour of her breast against his back, and her breath was hot in his ear.

"You are misguided, human," she said. "You were trained to believe that  _patients_  have a choice in their  _care_ , were you not? That the purpose of a doctor is to respect the  _bodily autonomy_  of those they work on. That if someone says  _no_ , you must stop, even if it is not in their best interests to do so. Am I right?"

"Yes!" The simple word broke from Julian's lips with a strength of resolve and certainty that heartened him. She could mock him and his ethical standards if she wanted to — goodness knows, everyone else had taken their turn — but that didn't make him misguided.

In his moment of righteous certainty, he didn't pause to consider where she was headed with this murmured diatribe.

"Well, you're wrong," she said. "The doctor's purpose is to get results, to further the general knowledge, and to obey the wishes of the Founders in all things. You are not a 'patient', you are a subject: a specimen. And you have no bodily autonomy, not here. In the Dominion, all bodies belong to the Founders, and yours is of interest to them. Now, if you will lie still, I will repair the fracture to your cheek while you are awake. If you will  _not_  lie still, I will sedate you. And you will never know what I have done."

Julian's heart seemed to stop. Time itself ground to a halt. His thoughts whirred at high warp, whipped to a frenzy but cold, awful panic. How had she known that would be an effective threat? Almost any other patient would have leaped at the offer of sedation; he knew that. Most people didn't  _want_  to be conscious for medical procedures, especially painful or invasive ones. He'd had patients request to be put under while he used a dermal regenerator! He could usually talk them out of it, of course, and when he couldn't, a delta-wave inducer was quick, harmless, and avoided all the difficulties of pharmacological anesthesia.

But Julian was desperate to know what this woman did to him. If he'd been even a little more lucid, he would be interrogating her right now about what they had done on the journey from Meezan IV. She could start with telling him what the hell she'd given him to cause such miserable withdrawal afterwards, and then…

He couldn't let her put him under again. It was better to know.

"I'll lie still," he said. Then he dared a clinical opinion. At least he could try to ensure her aim would be true. "You'll have better access if I'm on my back."

She straightened, releasing his head and retracting the other, more unsettling point of contact. She let go of his wrist last of all, and he heard the soft  _shush_  of skin on skin as she dusted her hands. "Will you turn yourself?" she asked. "Or shall the Jem'Hadar do it for you?"

He wanted to turn himself, and with two good arms he should have been able to. But his limbs were trembling and his head was swimming and he couldn't find the strength. They let him struggle for twenty long, humiliating seconds. The they flipped him unceremoniously, and suddenly the ridges were cutting into his back instead of his front. The ceiling, exactly like the one in Barracks 6 but much cleaner, spun lazily above him as Julian fought off senseless disorientation and the soldiers secured his limbs again.

"Gorotok'ren, immobilize his head," the Vorta instructed. Suddenly hard pincers were closing on Julian's collarbones, and his head was squeezed in the vise of two thickly-muscled forearms. He felt the rippled ridges of loose skin against his ears, and the Fifth's saurian face moved briefly into his line of sight as he adjusted his position and dropped into a crouch.

Julian knew it was wiser to be silent, but he couldn't help himself. "Has it been tested for use on the zygoma?" he asked. "Do I need something to protect my eye? Tritanium goggles?" He heard how ridiculous that suggestion sounded, when they were working out of a portable procedures tray. He groped for something less unobtainable. "A piece of lead flashing? A… a spoon?"

His voice faltered a little. Her lack of any response was making him desperate, increasing his anxiety exponentially. He forced himself to stop talking, and pressed his lips together. He felt a shiver of pain up the muscles on the right side of his face. While he didn't doubt that would be a thing of the past soon enough, it didn't quiet his fears. Next to the hands, a surgeon's most valuable tools were his eyes. Ocular implants were remarkable but imperfect. They fell far short of a natural human eye in many crucial respects, much less the keen, genetically enhanced pair Julian had taken for granted since the beginning of his academic ascent.

And this was the woman who had bungled the healing of General Martok's eye socket. It was possible she had even been the one to make the decision to anucleate, instead of to repair the organ. Suddenly he wished he had pressed the warrior for more details about his treatment at her hands.

"You're labouring under a misapprehension,  _Doctor_ ," she said coldly, coming back into view. She had the osteogenic stimulator in her hands, and she moved it into place. "It is not your eye. It's the Dominion's."

 _(fade_ )

He didn't think his vision was compromised. It was too early to be certain, but he didn't  _think_  so. Julian kept blinking, his gaze darting from fixed point to fixed point. He could see the scratches on the rivets on the ceiling. He could see the facets on the tiny sapphires in the Vorta's earring. If he closed his left eye, he could still see them, just not without adjusting the position of his head. The fracture was healed and his head had not exploded — though while the stimulator was working he had felt certain that it would — but the swelling around his eye socket was unchanged. So were colours, however, and the quality of the light was constant. He didn't  _think_  his vision was compromised.

"Sit him up," Tiellyn commanded. She had her back to him all of a sudden, sorting through one of the trays of her instrument cart. The Jem'Hadar obeyed, and Julian had to grip the edge of the centre crate as he swayed dizzily with the sudden change in position. His fever was still burning, but now all of his pain seemed concentrated in his flank. The other sites still ached, of course, but it was such a reduction from the quixotic anguish of open fractures that he could scarcely feel the soreness.

"Now, Deyos," said the Vorta doctor. "We will see if I can complete my tests. Hold this!" she snapped, whipping suddenly around and thrusting something at Julian.

It was a sphere, made of some translucent polymer with an electronic device at its core. The device had fan-like ridges, and looked a little like a barnacle studded with coloured lights that flickered and flashed. Julian caught it as it was foisted on him, and eyed it in puzzlement. It felt exactly like a child's ball — a little heavy, maybe, but the texture was unmistakeable.

"Squeeze it," said Tiellyn. She had the medical scanner in her hand again, and she was navigating its menus with two quick fingers. "As hard as you can."

Julian closed his fist around the ball and squeezed, but he did not obey her.  _As hard as you can_. He'd heard that one before. Of course, the Starfleet doctors who had performed his annual physicals at the Academy, and Nurse Jabara, who oversaw the same for him on Deep Space Nine, always said  _please._ But the instruction was the same, and so was his response. He squeezed firmly and precisely, exerting fifty-five point two kilograms of pressure: a high-average grip strength for a man of his age, deliberately not a round number, and similar but not identical to his last three equally deliberate results. Over the years, he had honed faking normalcy in physical tests to a perfect science.

"Other hand," said Tiellyn boredly, and Julian was seized by a moment of curious  _déja-vu_  before he remembered where he'd heard those words before, spoken in exactly that way. Vin, the haggard veteran of the Sanctuary District Police, ordering Commander Sisko to place his palm on the fingerprint scanner.

 _You didn't think you could bear that day, but you did it_ , a small, proud part of him insisted.  _We do what we have to, to survive_.

He moved the ball to his other hand and squeezed. It was his left, non-dominant. Fifty-one point eight kilograms of pressure seemed about right.

Tiellyn was looking at him pensively, her head tilted to one side so that her right earring swung pendulously, and her left rested in the hollow of her ear. "Do it again," she said silkily, her painted lips curling into a serpentine smile. "And this time, if you do not use your full strength, Gorotok'ren will cut off your nose."

Alarmed by her insight far more than the threat, Julian squeezed again. This time, he exerted seventy-four kilograms of pressure. It was considerably higher than the average, but still believably achievable without training or a history of sustained manual labour. As Julian shifted the ball to his other hand, he was relieved to note that it was now slick with sweat. He had a feeling that the absence of perspiration might have been what tipped her off the first time. He hoped that was the case. His right palm was wet, too, and he squeezed, this time careful to avoid a round number. Eight-one point three kilograms.

Tiellyn's eyes narrowed, but she took the ball from him and returned it to the tray. The Fifth made no move to cut his nose off, so Julian assumed he had passed this test. He scrubbed his palms against the lap of his uniform and tried not to think too hard about lying down again. It would feel wonderful, he didn't doubt that. His head was swimming, and the chills were back. He was still running a fever, and the deep, pernicious pain in his flank was throbbing to a new rhythm. He had wondered why she would fix the fractures but leave the kidney. At least now he knew why she'd prioritized the scapula.

She opened a flat case, and loaded an empty vial into the Dominion's equivalent of a hypospray. She approached him without preamble, grabbed a fistful of hair with her left hand, and pressed the device to his throat. He heard the hiss of negative pressure and heard the almost noiseless gurgle of blood collecting in the vessel. She was taking it right out of his jugular vein, freshly deoxygenated as it returned from his brain. The sensation was horrible. He felt as if his mind were being drained, not just of blood but of thought, and it was suddenly very difficult to breathe. When the vial was full, she withdrew both hands. Without her hold on his head, Julian swayed, giddy, nauseous and breathless.

Rough hands seized him from behind, gripping his arms and keeping him from falling. His head lolled, and his vision was filled with black spots. Tiellyn glanced at him and sniffed disapprovingly.

"You don't need to be so dramatic. I only took five millilitres," she said. She turned again, sliding a fresh canister into the hypo and approaching him from the other side. "Now, I'm going to take another five," she said with grim glee, and pressed the device to the opposite vein.

 _(fade_ )

In the end, she took sixty. It wasn't a substantial amount of blood: about one percent of his body's total volume. Either the way she was extracting it was placing undue strain upon him, or the effort of remaining upright was too much to endure, because by the time she was finished, Julian hung limp against the hands of the Jem'Hadar behind him, sawing laboured breaths against the urge to lose consciousness.

Tiellyn put the last vial into what looked like a portable spectroscopy scanner. Julian couldn't make his eyes focus properly, so he couldn't even attempt to read the screen. He knew it would have been useless anyway: all he knew were numbers, and he had already discovered that wouldn't get him very far without units of measure. He tried to watch her face instead, but she looked only faintly perplexed and gave nothing more away.

She stowed that vial with the others and turned to look at him, still silent and unreadable.

"Are you finished?" Deyos asked, his irritation plain. "You've disrupted the function of this camp enough already."

"I don't think you want to measure which of us is more disruptive," Tiellyn purred. She stepped forward, shoes clicking. Inanely, Julian noticed that her garments were all sewn of the same cloth: her close-fitted tunic, the asymmetrical skirt, the snugly fitted trousers beneath. Apparently she rated a coordinated wardrobe, while Deyos's garments were mismatched. It was a strange thing to contemplate just now, but while he kept his mind working he was in less danger of passing out. Her threat, the only one that had truly affected him, echoed in the halls of his memory:  _I will sedate you. And you will never know what I have done._

She reached with both hands as if moving for his throat. Instead, she seized the front of his jumpsuit and opened it to the waist in one fluid movement.

Julian stiffened, but he could not recoil. He could not even swat her hands away as she reached inside the garment and navigated his right arm out of the sleeve. The Jem'Hadar holding him adjusted his grip to allow it, and then changed position on the other side so that Tiellyn could do the same with his left. She reached behind his neck to open the back of the undershirt's grey collar. Then her hands moved around his waist, freeing the two remaining layers from the waistband of the jumpsuit. She stripped them off him as if he were a disobedient child, roughly removing turtleneck and singlet as if they were one layer. Part of Julian's mind wanted dimly to fight. Another part, frightened and bewildered, wondered why she was undressing him. The voice of the physician within had an answer.

_You wouldn't treat a ruptured organ through a patient's clothes. You wouldn't diagnose a battered kidney without visualizing the flank._

But when he was bared to the waist, the Jem'Hadar's rough hands gripping his naked arms to keep him upright, it was not his kidney she went for, but his sternum. Julian let his chin fall to the notch between his clavicles, so that he could look down at himself. His head was impossibly heavy and he could manage no more useful contortion. What he could see from this vantage was quite bad enough. His left side was black with bruises that wrapped around behind. They reached from his ribs to his pelvis, and sent out tendrils of blue and purple towards his umbilicus. Worse, the flesh looked edematous and puffy. He was distracted from the gruesome sight when Tiellyn planted a small, cylindrical instrument against his breastbone.

The side she pressed against him, squarely between his nipples, was flat. The other with a clear glass dome affixed to it. He could see the glow of the device as she pressed the appropriate control. There was a faint susurration of particles rematerializing, and the dome was suddenly filled with dark, carmine soup: his bone marrow.

This procedure, at least, had been painless. The device was some kind of micro-transporter. She untwisted the dome and set it aside: it was completely sealed. Tiellyn affixed a fresh one, and applied the tool just below his ribs on the right. What she beamed up this time was a collection of shredded tissue. Julian felt something shift within him, and he understood she had just biopsied his liver. Apparently the device spared the nerves: there was no pain. Whether it also spared the blood vessels remained to be seen, he supposed.

"Lie him down," she told the Jem'Hadar. The one behind him navigated his torso. Another grabbed his legs. Then suddenly, blissfully, Julian was flat on his back, his unsteady head firmly anchored by the crate beneath. The sick feeling of imminent syncope faded a little, and it was easier to breathe down here.

But then Tiellyn was tugging at his garments again, and Julian wished he were still upright. At least then he might not have felt so defenceless. She rolled the top of his jumpsuit low about his hips, so that the waistband was no longer around his waist. She offered no warning of her actions, no explanation. She merely did as she wished without regards for what she had so scornfully called his body autonomy — his absolute right not to be touched without his consent.

It was horrible, humiliating, and utterly unnecessary. Julian understood that there were times when a doctor had to have access to a patient's bare flesh, and the patient was not always in a fit state to disrobe unaided. He wasn't in any such state himself at the moment, weak and dizzy and disoriented as he was. But all she would have had to do is explain what she was doing and why, and he would have been able to bear it. As it was, when she folded back the waistband of his trunks and bared his suprapubic region, he felt a wave of mortified vulnerability that turned his empty stomach and made him long for unconsciousness.

 _At least you'll be able to remember what was done to you_ , he told himself frantically.  _At least this time, you're not drugged insensate. At least this time…_

Something cold and hard pressed against his flesh, just above his pubic crest. He heard the hiss of the ersatz-hypo again, and felt a sudden easing of the pressure on his bladder. Julian closed his eyes, trying to talk himself out of the feeling of violation. A urine sample, that was all. She had taken a urine sample.

He heard the telltale slosh of fluid, and forced himself to seek out his assailant with his eyes. She was standing over him, holding the sample to the light. It was almost scarlet.

"Gross hematuria," she said with perverse satisfaction. She looked him straight in the eye, lifting one brow. "I'm sure you know what that means,  _Doctor_."

"You're the one who's seen the scans," he said. His voice was hoarse, his throat was parched, and he couldn't manage more than a whisper. "How bad is it?"

"Bad," she cooed, pursing her lips. "You would call it a Grade 4 renal injury. Multiple lacerations, only two of them deep enough to qualify. There's damage to some of the secondary renal vessels. No avulsion, but you have a  _significant_ hematoma. Your glomerular filtration rate is impaired."

"How impaired?" Julian asked. He hadn't expected her to tell him even this much, but he couldn't help asking for more. Specimen or patient, surely he had a right to know how dire his situation really was.

She clicked her tongue. "Now, that  _would_  be telling!" she chided. "My recommendation would be surgery, but we really aren't equipped for that here." She smiled poisonously as she said it. She knew that was exactly how he would have phrased the problem. Only he would have said it with regret and ill-concealed frustration instead of amusement.

"Can you stop the bleeding?" Julian asked, more lucid now than he had been in days. The concrete diagnostic information had galvanized him, lending him reserves of strength he'd believed long spent. He wasn't foolish enough to try to lift his head, much as he wanted to get another look at his flank. Dizziness still swirled in the dark recesses of his brain, waiting to swallow him at the slightest invitation.

"I can give you a clotting agent," she said indifferently. "If I do, you probably won't die, at least not from loss of blood. A pulverized kidney  _can_  heal on its own: you'd have a fighting chance. Unless you want me to open you up here, while the Jem'Hadar watch?"

She made it sound like a serious offer. In her place, it was absolutely what Julian would have done, assuming evacuation to a sterile facility was completely out of the question. He could have rigged a small sterile field with a containment generator and done his best. But he cared about his outcomes. He had an ethical and personal investment in every life that came under his care. Tiellyn, obviously, had no such moral watchdog on her shoulder. He didn't trust her to try her best. He didn't trust her at all.

And a Grade 4 renal injury, if she was telling the truth about the severity,  _could_  heal on its own. With diligent bed rest and plentiful fluids and adequate nutrition, his prognosis was good. Julian didn't let himself dwell too long on the adjectives or the fact that he couldn't read his own scans. He couldn't afford to think about either.

"No," he whispered. "I don't want that. Give me the clotting agent, and I'll take my chances."

Tiellyn shrugged indifferently. Plainly she had no investment in the question whatsoever. She dipped her hand into her instrument trays and brought up a vial of medication, which she loaded into the pressure infuser. "Pity," she said, as she pressed it to his shoulder and administered the dose. "I've dissected half a dozen of your species. I would have liked to see if you're any different, anatomically."

 _(fade_ )


	38. Dismissed

**Part VII, Act III: Dismissed**

Julian's throat closed in dread. "What are you talking about?" he croaked.

Tiellyn smiled and leaned over him again, bracing a hand on either side of his hips. "Oh, didn't I explain?" she said. Then she glared sharply over her shoulder to where Deyos stood near the partition. "You are dismissed."

"Dismissed?" Deyos sneered incredulously. "This is  _my_  command centre. You can't just dismiss me."

"I think you'll find I can," said Tiellyn indolently. She nodded to one of the Jem'Hadar standing near the exit. He strode immediately to the other Vorta's side, tall and menacing.

Deyos's eyes narrowed as if he did not quite believe the soldier would lay hands on him. In the end, he decided not to test it. "I should hear my First's report on the count," he said, trying to sound as if this was an incidental matter completely unrelated to anything they'd been discussing. "The prisoners are known to be difficult."

"So you've said," Tiellyn observed, her voice very dry. She stopped short of rolling her silver eyes, but likely only for aesthetic reasons. "Go and take your report, then, and you needn't return. I'll find you when I want you."

Deyos looked ready to make an unwise retort, but the Jem'Hadar looming at his shoulder shifted pointedly, and the Vorta moved for the door.

Julian knew the sound was coming, but it still made him flinch. He was beginning to think he was making his startle reflex worse by anticipating and trying to compensate for the clatter of the doors. But in his current state there wasn't anything he could do to control his body's responses, and he tensed almost as badly when the door slammed closed again. His battered muscles protested miserably, and his head ached.

Tiellyn leaned forward, quick as a cobra, and planted her palm in the middle of his chest, applying steady pressure that reminded him she had not mended his ribs.

"You see," she said, savouring the syllables; "I had to come back for you because the results from my first set of samples were… anomalous. Your immune system markers in particular were  _very_  strange. Nothing that would show up on a routine hematology scan, mind you.  _Subtle_  differences. They might have been the result of poor collection methodology, or perhaps our vessel passed through an unidentified quantum singularity. Anything is possible, don't you think?"

Julian didn't answer her. Anything he tried to say at this point would only breed suspicions.

"So here I am, to take new samples," she said, twisting her dark lips with grim delight. "And to watch that little toad jump, of course. Don't you find it diverting? These camp commander Vorta; they think they're so important. The little lords of their private little asteroids, puffed up with pride because they can push around a couple hundred unarmed aliens. But do you know what, Doctor?"

For once, she uttered the title conversationally, reserving her contempt for Deyos and his ilk instead of wasting it on Julian. He didn't speak, and tried not to stiffen as she leaned closer, so close that their noses almost touched and he could smell the faint fruity aroma on her breath. He recalled the same scent coming from Deyos, but he couldn't quite remember when, not in his present state of feverish exhaustion and strain.

"An asteroid is only a rock," Tiellyn whispered throatily. "And the prisoners are little better than animals. It doesn't take  _skill_  to subdue an animal. Only force."

Julian closed his eyes and turned his head away, troubled more by her proximity and her power over him than by the taunt. She laughed and straightened, increasing the pressure on his sternum as she did so.

"Oh, don't take it too much to heart, human," she said. "We're all just animals in the eyes of the Founders. Some of us are simply… more  _accomplished_  animals. And some of us are like  _you_."

This last word dripped with scorn. She withdrew her hand, and a moment later he heard the clatter of instruments as she rummaged through her cart. "I know I have it somewhere," she murmured. "Ah!"

She was back at his side in a moment. He didn't want to look at her. She gripped his jaw and straightened his head. "Another thing unusual about you?" she said. "How much sedative it took to keep you under. You kept swimming towards consciousness like a Argrathi eel in an aqueduct sluiceway."

Speaking against the pressure of her hand was difficult. At least there was very little pain, now that she had mended his cheekbone. "I'm an ultra-rapid cytochrome metabolizer," Julian said thickly, unable to move his jaw properly. "It's a natural variation in—"

"Ye-es," she said slowly, thoughtfully, cutting him off. "That's what it says in your Starfleet medical files. "But the thing is,  _Doctor_ , we accounted for that. Or thought we had. Yet it was insufficient. I've never given a humanoid prisoner a dose like that. Even the Klingon only took two-thirds the amount you burned through in the end, and we transported him much farther. I confess I wondered whether it would cause brain damage."

Remembering the mental haze under which he had laboured for his first couple of days in the prison, Julian felt his pulse quicken. His eyes snapped open and locked on her face. "What did you give me? What drug? Or was it a combination—"

She laughed, a chromatic quicksilver sound that made him shudder, even though he knew she'd be able to feel it. "Oh, you're sadly mistaken!" she sang. "I wasn't trying to  _consult_  with you! Nor am I going to answer any of your questions. I got what I came for, and you're better off now than when I arrived. Be grateful for that, human. Many would give what little they have left to receive such care."

 _Care_? She called this care? She had belittled him, discussed him like a specimen, ignored his rights and his dignity, refused him even the smallest consideration or comfort. At this very moment, she was gripping his face as one might muzzle a disobedient dog. She raised her other hand. There was another tool in it, unrecognizable in its Dominion-designed housing. She thumbed a plate near its base, and it began to hum.

"Hold still," she warned, adjusting her grip on his mandible. "I've never done this on a face before."

The whine of the instrument altered as she applied it to his jaw, and Julian had to fight the urge to struggle. He didn't know what that thing was, or what it was capable of doing to him. The wild, panicked thought that if she'd never used whatever-it-was on a face, he didn't want  _his_  to be the first flashed uselessly through his mind. She had spoken so coldly about dissecting the bodies of sentient beings: she clearly was not averse to experimentation.

All he could do was obey her and stay as still as possible. There was nothing else he could do to protect himself.

A familiar, acrid stench wafted up to his nostrils: burning hair. His jaw felt warm where the tool hovered near his skin, ruffling the stiff bristles of sixteen days' growth of beard. Then there was a crackling, tickling sensation as something flaked away from his nerve endings. He could only spare a small, despairing plea that it wasn't his skin… but he didn't smell burnt flesh, only hair.

As she moved the tool down from his ear, he thought he understood. He felt something prickly and very lightweight sprinkle down onto his throat. He wanted to raise his hand to his face to confirm, but while he was still uncertain he didn't want to take the risk. He waited as the tool moved closer to his mouth, and the Vorta's grip changed again. When the first hair landed on his lip, he knew he was right. She was shaving him.

Inexplicably, she was shaving him. He kept still while she finished, restraining the urge to sneeze when an incautious breath drew a few felled hairs into his nostrils. Finally she reached his other ear, and the buzzing abruptly ceased.

"There," she said, coolly disgusted. "Now perhaps you'll look less like an ape. Brush off: don't just lie there in your own mess!"

Julian did brush off, not because she had commanded it but because he was seized by a sudden longing to feel a smooth cheek again. He spread his hand over his jaw, wiping away the trails of threshed stubble and taking a moment to revel in the relief that it was gone. It was a very close shave, just as close as he was able to achieve with his little blue razor cube at home. But reality quickly superseded relief. She hadn't done it for his sake, but to further assert her power over him. And now his neck itched.

Tiellyn was studying him again, dispassionate and appraising. She looked like an archeologist examining the fifteenth identical unremarkable relic unearthed from a dung-heap. "Better," she pronounced at last. "You're not as ugly as most Alpha Quadrant species. If not for those ridiculous ears, you'd be almost handsome."

It took almost the last dregs of Julian's spirit to curl his lip at her. Remembering her words to Deyos earlier, he twisted them back upon her, "I don't think you want to measure which of us has the more ridiculous ears."

Her eyes widened and her lips parted in momentary astonishment, and then she laughed, tossing her head so that the earrings danced. "You  _are_  incorrigible!" she said. "I see why you've driven Deyos to such lengths to subdue you."

Julian didn't think this was worthy of a response. He turned his head away from her, trying to brush some of the scratchy shorn hair from his neck. The effort made his arm ache.

The klaxon sounded: two piercing blasts. Julian's eyes moved instinctively towards the comm output on the ceiling. His mouth, already dry, seemed to shrivel into a desiccated sandscape of palate and tastebuds and gums. His stomach, almost forgotten in the ordeal of his "treatment", awoke with a snarl of famine. His salivary glands burned dryly.

Tiellyn had followed the sound as well, but now she was watching him with great interest. "What's that signal mean?" she asked.

Julian tried to answer, but his mouth was too dry. He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes. Not again. He couldn't fail to draw his rations again. His hunger, at least, was his own, but when he failed to get water, everyone in his barracks paid the price.

But what could he do? He was trapped in here, behind a guarded door and a force-field. Dizzy and weak as he was, he didn't know if he could stand, much less try to evade four Jem'Hadar. If he asked her to let him go, she would only laugh again and find further cause to debase him.

A finger and thumb clamped down on his right earlobe, twisting it painfully. "I asked you a question, prisoner," Tiellyn said, her voice suddenly dangerous.

"Mealtime," Julian croaked, giving in not to the discomfort, but to the helplessness. Was there anything in this wearisome Galaxy worse than helplessness?

"Oh." The single, stilted syllable was unreadable. He tried anyway. Surprise? Disappointment? Comprehension? Then she curled her lip.

"I suppose you're  _hungry_ , venal little creature that you are?" she mocked. "The human is a greedy animal, always thinking with its stomach."

Julian fixed her with the closest thing he could manage to a stony glare. But his empty belly betrayed him. It let out an audible gurgle, wrenching wretchedly under his ribs. Tiellyn's eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction. Hot, humiliated rage swelled impotently in Julian's chest, but he was powerless. He held his tongue.

The Vorta abruptly released her hold on his ear and turned crisply around, showing him her back in the neatly tailored tunic. She closed one side of the instrument tray with a  _clack_ , and then stowed away the container of blood and tissue samples. She wafted a lazy hand at the Jem'Hadar, not troubling to face them.

"Take the specimen away," she instructed. "We're finished here."

Julian couldn't quite believe what he had heard. He had no time to process it, either, because rough hands were seizing his bare shoulders, sitting him up while another soldier grabbed his feet and swung them over the side of the middle crate. While he had been lying down, the unsteadiness in his head had been almost bearable. Yanked suddenly upright, so quickly that even his neck couldn't tense fast enough to keep his head from falling back as he went, the fragile homeostasis was shattered, and mind-bending vertigo overwhelmed him.

His vision was eclipsed by a dozen black pulsars, all flaring and bursting at once. He felt a bubble of nausea and bile burst up through his cardiac sphincter, scorching his esophagus. He made an inelegant sound:  _urp_! His flank and his head and his trapezius ached. One sharp javelin of pain pierced his left side. The Jem'Hadar didn't care about any of that: the soles of his boots slapped the floor as they yanked him to his feet.

In that moment when everything else was scrambled sensory chaos and the looping threat of syncope, one sensation stood out. Julian could feel his uniform jumpsuit, pushed low during the unceremonious and humiliating baring of his torso, sliding down his hips. Reflexively, he grabbed for it. His hands were unsteady and he had no real control over them, but somehow he managed to arrest the garment's undignified descent. He tangled the deflated sleeves about his wrists, trying to hold it up even though his fingers really wouldn't grasp.

There was a Jem'Hadar on either side of him now, driving him forward with iron grips on his arms. He was starting to think he'd develop permanent divots in the places their fingers always settled, if his captivity dragged on much longer. It was an inane thing to imagine, especially at a time like this. His thoughts were very muddled.

His vision still hadn't cleared when the door shrieked open. Julian balked, digging in his heels and managing, somehow, to arrest his forward momentum, at least for a moment. "Wait!" he cried, hating the frantic note in his voice but frankly amazed he had managed to raise it at all. "My clothes…"

His shirt and his singlet were still lying on the floor somewhere behind, where the Vorta had dropped them disgustedly. The air in the corridor was much colder than the air in Deyos's office: his skin was erupting with gooseflesh, and he started to shiver. He couldn't afford to loose one garment, much less two.

"Move!" the Jem'Hadar commanded.

"Give them to him," Tiellyn countermanded boredly. "I have no use for the vile things."

There was a thunder of heavy boots, and Julian was jostled as a third soldier pushed past the one holding his right arm. A loose bundle was thrust against his stomach, and his forearms flopped up to pin it there. He could feel the familiar jersey knit of the turtleneck, and the coarse, oily stiffness of a strip of old blanket. Then they were moving again, and he could only focus on trying to move his feet so that the guards didn't simply drag him.

 _(fade_ )

They turned him unceremoniously out into the atrium, staggering, dizzy, still blinded by artifact from the sudden change of position, and half-naked. Julian stumbled when the flung him forward, unable to catch his balance or arrest his fall. His arms were entangled in his garments, and he only just managed to thrust up one forearm as he fell, so that his brow didn't smash into the stone floor. He pressed his eyes against the taut fabric stretched over his bare arm, heaving painful breaths while the world spun around him, and trying to get his knees up under his body. He'd been here twelve Dominion days: how was it he hadn't learned how to maintain his balance and coordination when shoved about by the guards?

He heard them move off, but other feet were pounding towards him, the sound of these soles less crisp. They skittered to a stop too near his head and he cringed, trying instinctively to shrink away from the unknown threat. Whoever it was, they dropped to their knees and cold fingertips brushed his right shoulder.

"What have they done to you? Your clothes… your  _arm_ …"

Julian recognized Kalenna's voice, and heard the strained anxiety. He didn't understand why she was so upset. His arm was  _fine_ : it was just trapped at the end of a tether that seemed to consist mainly of his left jumpsuit sleeve. He was more concerned about his back, bare to the frigid air, and alive with pilomotor prickles.

Kalenna was touching the arm in question now, having abandoned the right one. She probed his deltoid, and then felt his shoulder. As her palm settled over his scapula, Julian understood. She was worried about the fracture.

"She fixed it," he rasped, trying to push himself up so he could look at her, and failing utterly. "It doesn't… fixed it…"

He didn't know if he'd made himself clear. Other boots were approaching, not as quick but every bit as purposeful. Far heavier, too, with a break in the gait to accommodate a compromised hip. General Martok.

"Prisoners!" a stern voice barked, some distance away. "Return to formation immediately."

Kalenna's voice was almost in his ear. She was curled over him, sheltering his head and shoulders protectively. "Can you stand? Are you able…"

"Allow me," Martok rumbled, and Julian found himself being once more hoisted to his feet. The Klingon handled him with more care than the Jem'Hadar had done — he could not be said to be  _gentle_ , precisely, but the motion was steady and sustained instead of abrupt and brutal. A cascade of cloth tumbled from Julian's arms as he rose, and Kalenna rose deftly to gather it up.

"Prisoners!" the Jem'Hadar repeated, nearer now.

Martok growled at him. "We're moving," he snarled, and Julian, braced against him, could feel the rumble of his voice through his armour. "Do you wish us to leave him here?"

"All prisoners are to assemble for ration call, or vacate the common area," the Jem'Hadar declared in that rote way they had of repeating the rules.

"We're assembling," Kalenna said quickly, almost placatingly. "So is he."

The Jem'Hadar made a noise of indifferent disgust, but they were already walking, Julian trying to keep pace with Martok and still struggling to hold his jumpsuit up around his hips. His vision started to clear in random blotches, and he could make out the dark snake of the meal line as it grew closer.

"Sub-Lieutenant!" Kalenna commanded briskly. "Fetch his bottles at once."

Julian couldn't pick Parvok's face out of the string of pale, dark, or grey-hued ovals, but he could imagine the fearful expression. "But the guards—"

"At once, Sub-Lieutenant!" Kalenna barked. It was a stern, militaristic command of the sort no officer could disobey.

One of the bodies broke from the line and took off at a brisk trot. The next thing Julian knew, he and Martok were in the queue themselves, standing right behind the Breen. He sucked in a cold breath through his nostrils, disturbing the loose hairs he'd inhaled earlier. His whole body clenched with the force of the sneeze, and to his shame, he failed to shield bring up his elbow in time. Both arms were still entangled in his jumpsuit.

Strangely, the sneeze cleared the last of the blackness from his vision, and Julian's eyes managed to focus just in time to catch Martok's almost comically perplexed expression. Of all the things they had expected of him, a sneeze apparently did not rank very high.

"Thank you," Julian huffed thinly. He looked at Kalenna, who was standing just out of the line too his right. "I'm… the Vorta doctor…"

Apparently, his eloquence had not returned with his sight. She seemed to understand. Lips pressed into a thin line parted as she said softly; "She treated your wounds?" Then her eyes travelled down his bare body, resting on his hideously discoloured flank. "Not all of them."

"There wasn't much she could do about that without opening me up," Julian said, finding that the words came after all, if he approached them with his clinician's mind. "I didn't want that."

"And she respected your wants?" Martok said skeptically. Julian looked at the mangled web of scar tissue where his left eye had once been, and felt suddenly sick with abhorrence. Had that hateful, soulless woman handled the newly-blinded General with the same contempt she had exercised on him? Of course she had.

"Not entirely," Julian admitted. "I honestly don't think she cares what happens to my kidney."

She hadn't cared about any of it, except as it served her ability to collect her samples and her readings. And whatever perverse pleasure she had taken from shearing off his young beard.

Kalenna had his shirts and the demolished bandages bundled under her arm now. Julian looked around, wondering where his two rescuers had stowed their canteens. Then he saw that the Breen carried six instead of two: the others must have handed them off.

His head was still reeling slowly. He had to resist the urge to rest it on Martok's broad, armoured shoulder. Julian shifted his weight, trying to bear more of it himself, and he felt the General's grip travel a little further down his arm. Now he was being supported, not carried.

"Doctor," Kalenna said awkwardly, her eyes flicking down towards his legs. "Your garments…"

Julian looked down, finally disentangling his arms and bundling both sleeves into one fist. The jumpsuit rode very low, exposing not only his trunks, but the fact that their waistband was still folded back, baring almost the last inch of his torso and the dark thatch of curls on his pubis. A hot flush rose in Julian's cheeks as he hurried to cover himself, tugging the trunks back up into place. He glanced at his shirt and singlet, in the crook of Kalenna's arm, and decided that wrestling with them while trying to keep his feet was unwise. He hitched the waistband his jumpsuit back up where it belonged, and took an unsteady half-step away from Martok. He motioned at the collar of the garment.

"Can you help me?" he implored, glancing at the General.

They both helped him. He eased his aching left arm into its sleeve, and then slipped the right into the other. Martok drew the garment up over his shoulders, and Kalenna helped him close it. It felt strange to feel the familiar fabric of his uniform directly against his skin, without the usual intermediary layers, but at least modesty was satisfied and he no longer had to worry about keeping the damned thing from sliding down his legs. He let Martok nudge him two steps forward as the line moved up. His legs felt weak and unsteady, but they held him.

Parvok had returned: he slid into place behind the General, Julian's bottles crowded into his arms with his own. Kalenna took them, fumbling for a moment with the shirts. Julian felt a stab of guilt, followed quickly by a sense of futility. She'd need both hands to draw her rations, but so would he. So would they all.

Enabran Tain, who had been standing ahead of the Breen in line and not even deigning to look behind, turned abruptly and snatched the garments from Kalenna's arms. He rammed them into his left armpit, leaving that forearm and hand free to hold his bottles while his right hand started plucking canteens from the Breen and thrusting them at Julian and Martok.

"You're all a crowd of  _children_ ," he hissed disdainfully, no trace of his usual play-acted ebullience. "Incapable of solving the simplest problems. Get into the line, woman, before the guards take exception! And  _you_ ," he added, glaring at Julian. "If you're going to faint, be sure to step aside so you don't collapse on the conveyor. The Jem'Hadar don't take kindly to spillage, and if you cost any of the other prisoners their meal, I won't be able to protect you."

Julian didn't feel faint, at least not especially. He wondered how bad his colour must be for Enabran Tain, hardly assiduously watchful of his welfare, should think it likely he would. It had been horrible to lie there so long, half-clad and helpless with the Vorta looming over him. Now he thought he was probably fortunate she'd kept him like that so long. Without the physical respite, he might not have been capable of standing now.

The line moved up again, and Tain handed off his bottles to the first Jem'Hadar.

_(fade)_

He had meant to put on his shirts as soon as he was back in the barracks, but once Martok had helped him to his cot, Julian found he could not resist the temptation to stretch out upon it. For the first time in days, he was able to do so unaided. His left arm and shoulder were sore, but sound, and there was no nauseating explosion of agony when he moved them. He did feel a sickly sloshing in his abdomen as he eased himself onto the mattress, the left side burning dully. But it was bearable, as was the tired throbbing in his knee. When he laid his head down, there was no dagger of white-hot pain in his cheek: only a tired, bruised feeling where the inflammation was already receding around his repaired zygoma. Julian's eyes drifted closed almost immediately, slumber seducing him with promises of healing.

Major Kalenna had been separating clothing from rag, and she brought his shirts to him, neatly folded. Julian managed to look up at her long enough to murmur his thanks. He knew he ought to sit up and put them on. He understood that without every one of his sparse layers, he was going to wake freezing. But it was just too much effort to cope with the necessary exertions. He took the shirts and tucked them under his head instead, a welcome buffer between his skull and the lumps in the pillow.

Kalenna's lips rippled into a tiny, amused smile. Then she moved to spread his blanket over him. Martok was striding around the room, gathering the others. During the waking hours, at least, the others were able to be generous.

"Will one of you watch the door?" Tain huffed. "If the corridor is clear, I need to get into the wall and back to work. Unless you'd all like to linger a little longer in this holiday spot?"

"Sub-Lieutenant, watch the door," Kalenna instructed, far less sternly than she had uttered her last command to Parvok. She took the blankets from Martok. "Would you assist Tain, please?" she asked.

The General grunted his assent and stumped off. From the door, Parvok gave the all-clear. Kalenna was still draping blankets over Julian's mercifully anguish-free shoulder when he drifted off to sleep.

_(fade)_


	39. Reintegration

**Part VII, Act IV: Reintegration**

Careless hands turned him, calloused palms held him down. Distant, disdainful voices discussed him in cold, indifferent terms. He was a subject, a specimen, an animal, without autonomy or rights or feelings…

When another hand, this one broad and coarser than the ones invading his dreams, closed on Julian's shoulder, he followed it gratefully back to the waking world. Unfortunately, waking itself was difficult. His eyelids felt glued together and his head was heavy with fever and exhaustion and for some reason his neck itched ferociously. But his left hand rose to his face with only a dull ache in the shoulder and triceps, and Julian scrubbed the sand from his eyes as he blinked up at General Martok.

The left side of the warrior's mouth was bruised and bloody. There was a deep gash above his eyebrow. His lone eye was glassy and his jaw was set.

"I know you need your rest," he said, the words grinding out almost ruefully. "But you took it very ill last time when we left you to sleep. I did not wish to insult you by disregarding your instructions today."

Julian pushed himself up onto his elbow, understanding despite his fogginess exactly what had happened. "You were in the ring," he said. His voice was throaty and rough. He couldn't have been asleep for more than an hour or two, then, but it had clearly been long enough for his brain to shift into REM. As grateful as he was to have been pulled out of it, considering the bent of the incipient dream, the change left him groggy and nauseous.

Martok started to nod, and then stiffened and bared his teeth in pain. "I would not have troubled you," he said, taking a shuffling step backward as Julian flung off the blankets and sat up as quickly as he dared.

It was a little  _too_  quickly, as it turned out. His head swam and his vision clouded briefly. He thought he was still feverish: his mind had that particular muzzy quality he associated with an elevated core temperature. "Your elbow?" he croaked. Then he realized that couldn't be it: Martok had awakened him with a firm shake of his left hand.

"These," the Klingon said, the words grinding out over his clenched molars. He was holding up his right hand, palm inward. Julian blinked to clear his vision, and saw that the General's last three fingers were twisted, deformed, and already bruising to black.

"Sit down," Julian instructed, rolling onto his hip and using the wall to lever himself up. It was such a luxury to have the use of both arms again, and apparently not a moment too soon. Martok settled on the nearest bench with a hiss of discomfort, rocking a little against the pain. "It's a good thing you woke me. Fingers swell very quickly."

Martok made a noise of agreement. Julian was upright now, and the initial wave of dizziness was passing. They were alone in the barracks. Or rather, the room itself was empty. Julian didn't know whether Enabran Tain was in the wall, listening, but guessed he most likely was. That was the safest assumption, anyway. He sat down next to Martok, angling himself as best he could and taking the Klingon's dominant hand into his control.

"I need to see if there are any fractures," he explained calmly. "I'm afraid it may be painful."

"Do what you must," said Martok, looking away and surrendering his arm further into Julian's grasp.

Julian checked circulation and nerve function first, stabilizing the fingers with one hand while his other assessed capillary refill. He divided his eyes' focus between the hand and the General's face, watching for signs of increased pain. He wished he had been ringside, so that he could have seen exactly what forced his patient's body had been subjected to — and, more importantly, where else he might have sustained less obvious injury. A pang of guilt took him as he found himself wondering for the first time who else had been compelled to fight the Jem'Hadar while he lay incapacitated after his own bout.

But he had a patient in front of him, in need of help and suffering from six significant dislocations: the fourth and fifth metacarpal joints, three proximal interphalangeals, and one distal. Martok stiffened as Julian palpated the small bones, feeling for fractures and getting a clearer sense of the physics of each injury. They were all dorsal. Martok must have taken an awkward fall, landing with considerable force on his hand. He wondered if it had been the deciding blow, the cause of his defeat. He didn't think it would be wise to ask.

"How many matches did you fight today?" he tried instead, getting a firm, careful grip on the third intermediate phalange, keeping well clear of the proximal dislocation as he prepared to reduce the distal one. He would have liked to have been able to visualize the joint capsule with a tricorder, but such wishes were starting to become idle rather than desperate. Julian realized that he was actually growing accustomed to the primitive resources in his new practice environment. He hoped that didn't mean he was growing resigned. Weary though he was, he still had to fight.

He tractioned the joint slowly, smoothly and gently, applying meticulous hyperextension until the two bones slid back into their proper alignment. Julian repositioned his left hand onto the next phalange, and did the same with the proximal joint. Martok made a sound of puzzlement as it, too, slipped calmly straight again.

"That is not what I was expecting," he said.

"The smaller the joint, the less force required to reduce the dislocation," Julian explained. "If I tried to use the kind of force I exerted on your elbow, I'd tear the ligaments and maybe even crack the bones."

Julian moved to the fourth proximal interphalangeal joint and started tractioning. It was delicate, precision work. The procedure was painful: performing it without anaesthetic was far from ideal, particularly because the patient's anticipation of the heightening discomfort increased with every repetition, and Martok had to endure six.

"Try to relax," Julian coaxed as the arm against his side tensed and tightened. "I know it hurts, but resistance will only make it worse."

"A Klingon warrior has no regard for pain, Doctor," Martok rumbled. His arm, however, slackened noticeably.

"Believe me, that's quite evident," Julian told him sincerely. "I'm not sure a human patient would be able to stand this half as well." He thought of the tray of instruments that Tiellyn had beamed down from her vessel. Row upon row of slender canisters, glistening fluids within them and neat pharmacological labels on the sides. How many drugs did she have at her fingertips? How many analgesics? He should have tried to palm a few…

He knew that was only a fantasy. He'd been in no condition to play the pickpocket, and anyway he had no way of knowing what was in any of the vials — and no way of administering the medication anyhow, unless he had tried to steal the pressure infuser as well. And the penalties if he got caught at such theft were surely terrible.

"General," he asked, as much to keep his patient distracted as to satisfy his own curiosity. "How did Major Kalenna steal the laser scalpel? How was she able to get in to see you at all?"

Martok made a noise of strained, rueful consideration. "My eye was not the work of a morning, as you can surely understand," he said. "That she-targ tended me in stages. The Major was… insistent with the guards, demanding information on my condition. The Vorta took an interest, and Kalenna  _misrepresented_  the nature of the bond between us. By the time she was finished, she had the wretched woman convinced we were not comrades-in-arms, but something considerably more."

Julian looked up from his work as the joint slid into place, incredulous. "She convinced Tiellyn she was your  _par'Mach'kai_?" he asked. "And that  _worked_?"

The deception was imaginative enough. That it had actually swayed the dispassionate, soulless Vorta doctor was nothing short of incredible.

Martok pulled back his chin to regard Julian quizzically. "You speak enough Klingon to know that word? There is no true equivalent in human language."

Julian knew that: it was another one of those Klingon words that the Universal Translator just glossed over. He still hadn't decided whether that made it easier or harder to hear in the context he usually came across it.

"I don't see how the subterfuge helped her gain entrance," he admitted, forcing his eyes and his mind back on his work. "The Vorta doesn't seem the type to care whether her subjects are allowed time with their loved ones." He couldn't bring himself to use the word  _patient_ when speaking of Tiellyn. He could still feel her disdainful hold on his jaw.

"It seems she has an interest in inter-species mating rituals," Martok muttered, his voice straining a little as Julian manipulated the fourth metacarpal joint. This reduction required measurably more pressure than the interphalangeal adjustments. Julian held the Klingon's hard palm with his left hand and tractioned firmly with his right. "The Major invited an… advance. I slipped the scalpel into her tunic."

Julian shook his head in wonderment. Using Tiellyn's twisted academic curiosity against her was brilliant. "But you can't have planned it," he said. "How did Kalenna know you'd have something for her?"

"She did not. Not until… ah!" It was a sharp intake of breath, not quite a cry of pain. The joint realigned, and Martok's hand pulled instinctively against Julian's before settling deliberately into its semi-relaxed posture again. Before Julian could laud his patient's endurance, Martok resumed his tale. "Not until she was in the room with me. You have seen how she concerns herself with our welfare. After seeing me taken from the ring in such a state, she feared for me when I did not return for curfew."

Julian wondered, but did not ask, how long Martok had been segregated from the rest of the prisoners. It must have taken time, perhaps a day or two, for the Vorta doctor to arrive. He was a little astounded that she had been called at all, and when she had arrived she had done the minimum required to stabilize him — as she had just done with Julian.

"Well, it was very clever of both of you," he said. "One more finger. How're you holding up?"

"Satisfactorily," Martok said curtly. He hissed against ground teeth when Julian took hold of the proximal and intermediate phalanges of his smallest finger. This was the worst dislocation. Julian had to keep him thinking about other things.

"And you had the laser scalpel already?" he asked. "Tell me about that."

"We had been grappling with the question of shaving down the bolts for days," Martok said. He tensed as Julian began the longitudinal traction, but kept talking. "She used the device to…"

He grimaced but seemed unable to say it. Julian was more than happy to spare him the memory. "She used it on you, and so you knew what it could do," he said. He hoped with every fragile fibre of optimism in his heart that at least in this case, Tiellyn had administered some kind of anaesthetic, even if the General had so clearly been conscious. That kind of repair without sedation or pain relief was not mere malpractice: it was torture.

"Yes," growled Martok. "I concealed the tool. I expected them to notice it was missing, or to find it when they searched me prior to returning me to the barracks. I was correct: that was how it was retrieved."

"By then, the Major had returned it to you," Julian said.

Martok nodded tightly, his lips twisting as the joint realigned. Julian moved to hold his hand steady again. This was the last reduction: the fifth metacarpal joint. "Romulans are known for their cunning. Until I met the Major, I believed that to be a wholly dishonourable trait. I was mistaken."

"I haven't had much experience with other Romulans," Julian admitted. "I did serve briefly with an observer from the Romulan military on the reconnaissance mission to find the Founders' homeworld. Their prior homeworld."

"Klingons and Romulans do not serve together. They do not work together. They do not dine together." Martok looked around the dingy barracks. "Certainly they do not slumber in one another's presence. And yet here…"

"Here, we're more alike than we are different, and the true enemy is the Dominion," Julian supplied. There was a low but audible  _pop_  of the ravaged joint capsule as Martok's pinkie slid back into place.

The Klingon bared his teeth and nodded his head. He took his hand from Julian's grasp and started to ripple the fingers. Julian clamped his own against the underside, immobilizing them. "Ah… best not to do that just yet," he said ruefully. "I need to figure out some way to splint them."

"No splints," Martok growled. "Bandage them if you must, but a splint is too much a sign of weakness."

"Just keep it still," Julian instructed, easing the hand down onto the warrior's knee and positioning it carefully. Then he rose, intending to fetch the cargo case that held his scanty medical supplies.

 _Too fast_! his mind wailed, too late to arrest the upward motion. Julian swayed, and his vision was blotted out with brilliant bursts of multicoloured light. He took a staggering step in what he hoped was the direction of his bunk, bending down to grope for its rail. His fingers found it, closed upon it, and used it to ease himself down onto his knees. That was better, but not adequate. Something sloshed unpleasantly in his abdominal cavity, and horrible, gripping pain closed on his flank. He curled forward, pressing his brow to the thin, lumpy pallet. He could smell the sour, unwashed stink of the miserable mattress, and it did nothing to help his nausea.

While he struggled to regain control of his mutinous body, he heard Martok's voice as if from a great distance. "Doctor? Are you in need of assistance?"

His own voice, almost as remote, rasped out; "I'll be fine in a minute. Stood up too fast."

 _Bed rest, bed rest, you reckless fool!_  a part of his mind upbraided.  _You knew you needed bed rest_.

_What was I supposed to do? I'm the only doctor on this rock! I had to treat him._

Something about that thought seemed to ground him. Maybe it was the stubborn rejection of the idea that Tiellyn was a doctor, no matter how she styled herself. It got a little easier to breathe, and the pain in his side eased fractionally. The next thing Julian knew, he was coming back into his body instead of floating a few centimetres above it, and the unbearable heat dissipated, leaving him chilled and tired. Slowly he raised his head, still gripping the side of the bunk to steady himself. He was sitting back on his heels, which his right knee didn't much care for, but it had stood up to being bent, and that was probably a promising sign.

When he was sure he wasn't going to faint after all, Julian groped under the bed and dragged out the heavy case. He flipped up the latches and raised the lid.

Someone had coiled up the cut strips that had once bound his arm to his ribs, and laid them in next to the other pieces of blanket. The sling was there, too, one pair of transverse corners lopped messily off where Tiellyn had cut the knot. They were all too bulky for dressing fingers, but the rolls of lint bandage were just right. Remembering the cut over Martok's eye, Julian picked up the little bottle of iodine-based disinfectant and reached for the sterile swabs.

There were only six, where once there had been eight. He remembered Major Kalenna using one on his own lacerations, but what had happened to the other? Julian beat down the paranoid thought that someone had stolen it. He didn't want to be reduced to animalistic suspicions, and anyhow, who would steal one sterile dressing and leave the antiseptics? He left them untouched.

In the bottom of the case lay the feather-shaped piece of metal that was now their blood-screening tool. Julian realized the others hadn't subjected him to the test upon returning to the barracks. Then he glanced down at his left hand, where the tip of the fourth finger stung quietly. Sure enough, there was a small puncture-wound: one perfect pinion, a pixel of red. They'd tested him while he slept, apparently. He couldn't blame them.

The other piece of the stylus was there as well: a small, smooth cylinder three millimetres in diameter and six point five centimetres long. Julian retrieved it.

He wasn't sure it was a good idea to stand unaided, and he didn't think the cot would prove stable enough for leverage. Shuffling on his knees, he returned to Martok's side. He laid his scanty materials on the bench and gripped it as he rose far enough to slide back down beside the General.

"I need to splint your third finger, at least," he said. He held out his own hand, palm down, and used finger and thumb to indicate the small joint on his own hand. "The distal dislocation is very rare, and you've probably done serious damage to the ligaments. Without a splint, it's going to slip out again as soon as you move your hand too suddenly. I can wrap this in the dressings so it's not obvious, but I'm afraid it's non-negotiable."

Martok cast his glaring eye away, but he acceded. "Very well. If there is no other way."

He lifted his hand to yield it to Julian, and then cursed under his breath as the whole arm tensed. Julian heard the sick little  _pop_ , and feared that his prediction had come to pass. But it wasn't the tip of the third finger that had dislocated again: it was the interphalangeal joint on the fifth.

Julian considered reducing the deformity immediately. But decided against it. The motion the General had made had not involved the finger at all: if the mere inertia of lifting the hand had been enough to dislocate the finger again, it was obviously far more seriously damaged than Julian had anticipated. It would be better to wait until he could bind the finger immediately upon setting. He unrolled a length of the lint dressing, and set to work.

He splinted the third finger, first against Martok's index finger, and then with the stylus tip against the dorsal aspect. He wrapped the fourth finger securely against the immobilized third. Then he re-set the fifth finger. As he was binding it to the others, the joint slid out of alignment again. The ligaments were completely compromised.

"I'm just going to make an adjustment," Julian said, hoping he still sounded calm and capable. He needed to repair the torn sinews, but he didn't have the tools. They were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, with careful wrapping, time, and a lot of hope.

The manoeuvres and physical adjustments required to do it would have been much simpler with a second pair of trained hands. Julian found himself missing Nurse Jabara far more than he missed any of his tools. The skilled, patient and unflappable Bajoran had been with him from the very beginning. She was the most senior member of Julian's medical staff, and she was absolutely indispensable. She was the reason Deep Space Nine could manage with only one physician on permanent assignment.

"Support your wrist with your other hand, please," Julian instructed Martok. His patient obeyed, and he draped the length of bandage in the proper position. Gently and quickly, he re-set the joint and pinned the finger against its neighbour with one hand, supporting it above and below the unstable ligaments as he gathered up the bandage again. Deftly he wrapped the hand, returning support to the smallest finger with every pass. When at last everything was as stable as it was going to get, he knotted off the bandage around Martok's wrist.

"That should take care of it," he said. He nodded at the Klingon. "Where else are you injured?"

Martok grimaced, straining the swollen tissues at the corner of his mouth. "You will not be the only one with glorious bruises by nightfall, but the rest can be endured."

"That's not what I asked," said Julian archly. He got cautiously to his feet, this time without courting syncope, and moved to the General's other side. He brushed the laceration on his brow with the tips of his fingers, squinting against the dim light despite the keenness of his eyes.

"This looks superficial," he said. He took the tail of the lint bandage, a square four point two centimetres to a side, and folded it into a dense pad. He wet one corner with the antiseptic solution, and blotted at the cut. "How are your ribs? Your abdomen?"

" _Bruised_ ," Martok said, with the air of one repeating something for the four hundredth time. "I will inform you when I have need of further prodding."

Julian considered pressing the matter, but decided not to. Martok had survived two years in this place without the attention of an ethical physician. He could be relied upon to gauge his own need. He'd proven that, in fact, by waking Julian instead of leaving the fingers to swell. "And the elbow?" he asked.

"It aches," Martok said sourly. He flexed and stretched his arm, demonstrating the somewhat curtailed but still acceptable range of motion. "It held. You bandaged it well, and I was fortunate. The last time there were outside Jem'Hadar in the compound, the guards went to greater lengths to assert their prowess.

What did  _that_  mean? Julian decided it was better not to ask. "And your hip?" he asked, gathering his scanty supplies.

"Unaffected," said Martok. "Except in the sense that every battle wearies it."

Julian didn't feel the need to repeat his unencouraging prognosis. There was nothing either of them could do to improve upon it, not here. He gathered the remaining supplies and returned them to the case. He fished out one of the scraps of blanket too short to be useful as a compression dressing. He closed the lid of the case, but did not trouble to clamp it before sliding it back under the bunk with the side of his foot. A little lightheaded, but stable and upright, he shook loose two of the blankets he had cast aside, and moved to drape them over Martok's shoulders.

The General shot him a backward glare, and Julian met it levelly. "Isn't it true that Klingons don't like the cold?" he asked. "You adapt to it better than Cardassians, but that doesn't mean it's good for you. Try to keep warm, and get some rest. If you have any more trouble with your hand when I'm sleeping, do exactly what you did this time and wake me up. It's already inflamed, and that's going to get worse: if the finger dislocates again despite the bandage, I'll need to put it right immediately."

Martok's expression was stony and eloquent, but he said; "Understood." He drew the blankets closer about him, too, which Julian chose to take as a positive sign.

He sat down on his cot and picked up his bottle of water. The deep draught he took from it soothed his throat and cleared his head. Julian looked at the canteen, considering. He had drawn his full two litres today, and though he still could not spare any of it, he very much wanted to do something about the prickles on his neck. A few millilitres wouldn't make the decisive difference for his kidney. He dribbled a spoonful of fluid into his palm, and rubbed his throat and jaw with a wet hand, feeling the sharp, shorn hairs adhering to it.

Julian wiped his hand on the back of his calf, and then could not resist running it over his smooth cheeks. It was a ridiculous thing to savour so much, with all the more urgent problems and more important improvements to his condition, but the fact was that the simple luxury of being clean-shaven again made Julian feel much more like himself. He knew that could not have been Tiellyn's intention. He couldn't see any possible motivation for her action, save the need to assert her dominance and reinforce his helplessness. But as unpleasant as the experience had been, the result was this: Julian Bashir had, strange as it seemed, recovered something of his sense of self.

He didn't waste water elsewhere. He opened the front of his jumpsuit and slid his arms out of the sleeves. He wiped his axillae with the scrap of grimy blanket, scraping away oily perspiration and grains of dead skin. There wasn't much he could do about the sour smell of body odour, but at least he felt a little less foul. He found his shirts amid the blankets, and pulled them on. The cloth was chilled, and made him shiver as the open air had not, but the radiating heat of his still-feverish body would rectify that soon enough. Julian replaced his jumpsuit overtop, and found that, grimy or not, his uniform also made him feel a little more in control of his situation — perhaps even of his fate. When he lay down to sleep again, worn out but curiously satisfied, he did not dream.

_(fade)_

When next he woke, it was to the dull  _bong_  of a fist on the wall panel. Parvok and Kalenna were helping Tain back into the barracks. Martok, no longer shrouded in blankets, stood at the door, keeping watch. The Breen was on their cot, silent but no doubt watchful. Julian was in the curious position of finding himself almost comfortable, despite the fact that the cot was no more yielding than before and the barracks was cold enough that he could see the tendrils of his breath. He was reluctant to move at all, but he was thirsty.

He had retrieved his bottle and propped himself up on his elbow to drink by the time Tain emerged, puffing with the effort of crawling through the passage and hauling himself to his feet. He waved off Kalenna's supportive arm and stumped around the bench to sit down across from Julian. He braced a palm on one knee and stared at the Doctor while he caught his breath.

"We need to talk," he said at last.

"About your health?" Julian asked, striving for a measured tone. He did not much want to be alone with Enabran Tain, not after their previous "talk", but neither did he have any intention of betraying that reluctance to his dangerous cellmate.

"About the Starfleet listening posts," said Tain.

Julian relaxed marginally. He looked away from Tain as he capped his canteen. Then he rolled onto his back, savouring the freedom to do so despite the dull ache the position awoke in his lower back, and let his head thump aback against the too-flat pillow. "We can talk about that in front of the others," he said, studying the ceiling.

"Can we?" Tain intoned in satirical surprise. "Are these the people in front of whom you want to divulge Federation secrets? Not one, but  _two_ Romulan operatives? And what about the Klingon? Your government and his are at war, you know!"

Julian restrained the urge to glare at him. Tain had a pathological need to stir up discontent. It was practically a reflex. He kept up with his survey of the rivets above him. "That's an illegal war started by the Founders for the purposes of destabilizing the Federation and the Empire," he said. It felt cleansing to say it; cathartic. He'd sweated agony and anxiety into that damned war, and somehow knowing it was the work of the Dominion made it seem less senseless. "The sooner we get out of here and back to the Alpha Quadrant, the sooner the General and I can report that to our respective governments and  _stop_ the fighting."

He was surprised to hear himself say those words, and even more surprised to realize that it might be true: it was possible that he and Martok might bring an end to the war that had been tearing at their respective borders for eighteen months. The thought was dizzying. Maybe it was arrogant of Julian to believe that two men could accomplish something like that, but then again, the truth in this case was too compelling. The discover of the Changeling in their midst had slowed Klingon aggression and calmed Chancellor Gowron's rhetoric. Presented with a living Martok who could establish that he had been replaced before he had been seen to precipitate the collapse of the Khitomer Accords, the High Council would have to listen, wouldn't they?

Was it possible that something that monumentally important might come out of this ordeal?

"Ask me whatever you need to, Tain," Julian said. "The others stay."

"If you insist," the Cardassian said wearily. Out of the corner of his right eye, open farther now than it had been in days, Julian saw him shake his head. "When you say they are 'listening posts', what do you mean?"

"They're deep-space, fixed trajectory receiver arrays with omnidirectional subspace sensors," said Julian. "They were planted between starsystems, in the outer regions of Oort clouds with sufficiently low levels of background radiation to ensure clear signal reception and transmissions. They collect data and interstellar background noise on a wide range of subspace wavelengths, and they're programmed to prioritize the recording of non-random messages generated within the frequency variations I gave you before."

There was an unmistakable note of skepticism in Tain's voice as he said; "You seem to know a lot about them. For a physician."

Julian was getting tired of justifying his credentials to this man, who knew more than he had any right to about the inner workings of the joint Bajoran-Federation administration of Deep Space Nine, Julian's own role on the station, and everything else he had been able to pry his way into before his disappearance. Tain didn't really doubt his access to this information: he was challenging Julian's authority on the subject because he knew it got under his skin. He wouldn't rise to the bait.

"Either I know what I'm talking about, or I'm stupid enough to make up convincing nonsense, even though it would only slow you down and compromise our escape effort," he said boredly. "Decide for yourself which is more likely."

The response came swiftly and shrewdly, and it wasn't what Julian was expecting. "What is the access code for a Starfleet distress signal?"

He turned his head to look at Tain, whose eyes were piercing pinions gleaming out of his broad face. He was the consummate professional now, no longer needling or toying. Julian knew too much of him to believe he wasn't still manipulating, but clearly he had stopped playing around.

"A Starfleet distress signal?" Julian echoed. "If you try to transmit our message as a Starfleet distress signal, the Dominion will—"

"I know what the Dominion will do," Tain scoffed, brushing this off. "Answer my question!'

Julian frowned. " _No_. Not without knowing what you plan to do with it."

"The frequencies you provided will prioritize our message for collection, yes?" said Tain.

"That's right."

"But what about transmission? How is priority assigned to the raw data before it is transmitted to the communications array at the mouth of the Wormhole?" he asked.

Julian sifted through his recollections of everything Jadzia and Miles had said in the numerous briefings they'd given the senior staff of the listening post grid. "They're sorted by recognized patterns," he said. "Starfleet signals first, then Dominion, then those of other known powers, then organized but unrecognized messages, then…" He stopped. He understood. "Without some other identifying characteristic, a Cardassian message would be relayed after all identified Dominion subspace traffic."

"That's what I thought," said Tain, nodding. "As you said, we can't encode our message as a distress call. But if I have the access code for the listening posts, I can encrypt a subroutine that will only activate  _after_  the listening post computer picks it up. It will collect our signal as radio noise, but interpret it  _after the fact_  as a Federation distress call. It will give it top priority for relay back to the communications array, and so through the Wormhole back to Terok Nor."

He smiled and widened his eyes as he said, far more jovially; "So, Doctor, do I have your approval? Have I earned the information I need to get us all out of here?"

He was trying to paint a few reasonable concerns as obstreperousness, but Julian didn't bother to defend himself. He wasn't through with his questions. "That's a very sophisticated bit of programming," he said. "Are you really able to encode something like that one wire at a time?"

Tain's smile deepened and grew coldly cynical. There was something about that expression that had the eerie feeling of long familiarity, and Julian had to shake off the uncanny urge to run. "I suppose we'll find out," Tain said with slow delight; "won't we, Doctor?"

Julian gave him the access code.

_(fade)_


	40. Formulating a Hypothesis

**Part VII, Act V: Formulating a Hypothesis**

Julian tried to be a dutiful patient and follow his own advice. He rose as seldom as he was able, and walked as little as possible. He went to the waste reclamation room under his own power, and the following morning he mustered for a mercifully uneventful count and then later for ration call. Otherwise, he stayed in the barracks and did his best to keep to his cot. But the cot wasn't comfortable; the longer he remained immobile, the colder he got; and as he slept off the worst of his fatigue and the last lingering after-effects of the concussion, he ran into another problem.

By the middle of the afternoon, he was bored.

It was the first time in days he'd come up against this obstacle: the grinding lack of diversion and stimulation in this place. It was broken occasionally by violence and terror, but the rest of the time, there simply was not much to do. And when deprived of something to occupy and engage him, Julian always fell into dark thoughts.

He thought about Eighth Talak'ran, who had attended Deyos during the count that morning. He was once more restored to normalcy, a new Ketracel White port gleaming in his neck. It was of different design than the one Julian had ripped out, which of course made sense: the march of technology over the course of a decade practically demanded it. He had observed no anomalies in the Jem'Hadar's appearance: skin colouring, alertness, and pupil size were all normal. Now that the steady flow of the enzymatic cocktail was restored, it was as if he had never been maimed.

The surgical intervention did not change what Julian had done, however. It did not erase the memory of his fingers closing on the flange, or of those four simple steps —  _twist, push, lift and yank_ — that had extracted it from the man's neck.  _Bare-handed surgery_ , Tiellyn had called it, and in a sense she was right… but it was surgery according to her definition, not Julian's. An act of butchery, not of healing; medical knowledge twisted to violent ends. There had been no other way: the more time that passed, the more Julian understood that was true. But that did not make it a moral act. It did not purge him of remorse and disgust at what he had done, what he had confirmed that he was. And it did not soothe his conscience.

He had to think about something else, but what came to mind next was the Vorta doctor's quest to explain the anomalous test results. The Adigeon doctors had done meticulous work: Julian's physiology and his genome were close enough to those of a natural human that they had never been questioned. The rigorous medical exams at Starfleet Academy, his annual officer's physical, even a night under perpetual observation in the Intensive Care unit on Ajilon Prime: none had shown anything that could not be explained within the normal range of human variation. Julian had always found this both reassuring and embittering. He was fortunate to be able to pass for a real person — but then again, it would have been a poor counterfeit that couldn't stand up to the most cursory tricorder scan, wouldn't it?

She had said something about his immunological markers. That was one bodily system that had never been subjected to anything more than routine examination; Julian had never fallen prey to a serious infectious disease in his life. He rarely even caught a cold. It dismayed him to realize that he had never given that a second thought. He had just taken for granted that he was one of those lucky people with a hardy immune system, and that aided by good nutrition and the innumerable conveniences of modern life that supported good sanitation and slowed the spread of hostile microorganisms, he simply wasn't inclined to fall ill. Of course he should have suspected the secret was buried in his manipulated DNA, but somehow he never had.

He felt as if something had been stripped away from him. He had lost one more comforting fiction, one more reassurance that perhaps what had been done to him a quarter of a century ago wasn't so awful after all. It was one more reminder of his unnaturalness, and any fears he might have of what Tiellyn's next round of tests on his blood and tissue samples would show came a poor second to that. He didn't know what she would find, nor what she might do with information that could destroy his life and everything he'd worked for. But far, far worse was the feeling of being an aberration, a freak, a horrific creation out of some madman's laboratory.

 _It wasn't like that. It wasn't_. A small part of his mind wanted to believe this. He remembered the hospital on Adigeon Prime, and the endless barrage of tests and procedures. Most of them had been relatively painless. Some had hurt miserably but presumably unavoidably. All of them had been terrifying. The strange sounds, the lights, the pressure on this limb or that one, the horrible halo they had put over his head and left there for hours at a time, while he couldn't move or see or cry out. Restraints, soft but immutable, to keep him from shifting during delicate procedures. Even the innocuous  _hiss_  of a hypospray had scared him so much in those days, because he never knew how it would make him feel. Julian remembered the bewilderment and the helplessness and the dread, but most of all he remembered the loneliness: the awful sense of desolation as he wondered — and asked, tearfully, time and time again — where his mother and father had gone, and why they wouldn't come back for him.

But through it all, the Adigeon doctors and their staff had tried to be kind. They had talked over him almost constantly as they worked, saying things that had at first been nothing but gibberish, and had then become words he could remember and retain but didn't understand. Julian had decoded a lot of it only years later, when his medical education had brought him up against the same polysyllabic phrases and complex descriptors. But they had also talked  _to_  him, uttering all the platitudes of a good physician.  _This won't hurt at all. You'll see a very bright light; just lie still. We're almost finished, little one: hold on_.

One of them, an older woman with wispy silver hair, had sat with him sometimes while the halo was in place. He couldn't see her, but he could hear her, and he could feel her cool hand squeezing his while the other one danced over the controls of the device. She used to sing to him, songs he didn't know in a language her Universal Translator couldn't always reliably decode into English. He hadn't minded that he couldn't understand: a lot of the time, he didn't even understand his own mother's words, if she used the long and complicated ones or started talking too quickly. It had just been so nice to listen to her voice. Little Jules had thought she was someone's grandmother. Julian Bashir, a decorated physician and a skilled neurosurgeon in his own right, understood that she must have been an expert in microcellular intranucleal chromosome resequencing. Although he reflected now, lying on his side and staring vacantly across at the wall behind which Enabran Tain was hard at work, that the two weren't mutually exclusive.

It wasn't just Tiellyn's curiosity or the potential consequences of it that had unsettled him to his core. Julian was shaken by the helplessness he had felt, the utter vulnerability to her whims. He knew that being called a specimen by a cold, cruel servant of the Dominion did not make him one. But from the age of fifteen, when he had in his compulsive research following the revelation of unthinkable truths come across the accounts of what was ordinarily done with people like him, Julian had had a horror of being shut away and experimented upon.

He'd been rationalizing his captivity as he had rationalized other occasions when he had found himself locked up and unable to escape. Tiellyn's handling of him, however, had driven home just how trapped he was here, how utterly deprived freedom or choices. Julian didn't really believe — at least, not any more — that if his secret came out he would become an object of study and experimentation for Federation scientists. In the hands of the Dominion, however, he did not like his chances.

Julian was starting to feel his anxiety mounting. There was no point in brooding over things he was powerless to change or possibilities he was incapable of avoiding. Just like every other such fear he'd had since the age of fifteen, he was going to have to bury this one, tamp it down as best he could, and get on with his life.

Only there wasn't much life to be getting on with, not here. He didn't have a busy Infirmary with a steady flow of patients to tend to. He didn't have his research, which filled the idle hours when such traffic was slow. He didn't have the vast Federation database of medical journals to peruse, either purposefully or with the meandering pleasure of diving into any rabbit hole that piqued his interest. He didn't have the station's life support system to analyze and recalibrate, or a dispensary to inventory, or a suite full of surgical instruments to test and adjust and fine-tune. He couldn't poke his head into the science lab to see what fascinating project Jadzia had on the go this week, or wander down the Promenade to interrupt Garak at his work. He couldn't go to the holosuite with Miles, and while away three glorious hours at a stretch in a daring flight of imagination. He couldn't even sit down and catch up on his data entry. There was nothing to do.

Julian envied Enabran Tain. The space behind the wall was cramped and suffocatingly dusty. Standing in there for hours, picking away at eroded circuitry, surely wasn't especially pleasant work. But it  _was_  work: work with a purpose and a form and a clear objective on which to focus. Julian had nothing but his own battered but healing body, and the twice daily physical therapy sessions he planned to resume with General Martok. It wasn't much to occupy a busy, brilliant mind.

Considering it now, Julian understood that boredom lay at the root of his emotional malaise. Over the years he had developed strategies to cope with his fear and his self-doubt and the deep, visceral revulsion that he felt whenever he thought too long about his true nature. All of them involved an elaborate pattern of overlapping distractions, and the constant reassurance that he was useful, that he was worthy, and that the good he could do in the world far outweighed the menace in his genes. Bereft of his tools of emotional survival, he was adrift in the darkness.

He'd been focusing on his physical wellbeing. He'd neglected his mental health. It was the kind of oversight Julian would have been appalled to have made with one of his patients. He didn't know if it was less unforgivable in himself, or less?

Then again, wasn't viewing his actions and his errors as unforgivable part of the problem?

Bestirring himself against the slow, tired aches in his limbs, he pushed aside his blanket and worked his way gingerly upright. There was no hard flare of pain in his flank this time, which was probably more a reflection on the caution of the movement than on the state of his organs. Julian leaned forward gradually, careful not to strain, and reached under the cot to pull out his case of medical supplies. He fished in side for one sterile pad and the bottle of antiseptic.

There was a snort and a heavy sigh from his right, and Julian turned to Martok, who had been dozing in an upright position, braced against the wall as he sat on his bare bunk. "Doctor?" he said, yawning expansively.

"How's your hand?" Julian asked. He had examined it after roll call, checking the fingertips for healthy circulation and gauging the extent of the inflammation. The bandage was doing its work, and all the joints were still aligned.

"It is tolerable," said the General. He tilted his chin at Julian's hands. "Is someone wounded?"

Julian imagined someone probably was: surely there had been a prisoner in the ring earlier today. He had decided not to venture out ringside, exhausted as he had been from the ration call and determined as he still was to stick to his prescribed regimen of bed rest. He hoped that if the other prisoners had need of him, they would seek him out — he knew he couldn't count on that, but there had to be a compromise somewhere in all this. In a few days he would be fit to resume that duty, but only if he healed himself.

But in his despairing inventory of the slim tasks left to occupy him, Julian had remembered an unkept promise. A small exertion was surely justified in order to make right that failing. It would ease his mind, too, at least a little.

"I need to check on a patient," he explained, pushing the case back into its berth with the heel of his boot. He rose slowly but smoothly, and his head stayed steady. Julian took three steps towards the door, gauging his strength. He was fit enough for a short walk. Barracks 15 was only in the next pod. Determined, he closed the rest of the distance and depressed the door panel. On the threshold, he hesitated and turned back.

"General," he said, upon consideration; "I could use a bodyguard."

Martok bared his teeth in a dour grin. "I hoped you would say something like that," he growled.

 _(fade_ )

So late in the day, the atrium was quiet. A few prisoners milled aimlessly about, trying to keep warm. The Jem'Hadar on guard duty stood at their usual posts, unmoving and constantly alert. Julian did not see Parvok or Kalenna, although they had been gone from the barracks for over an hour. He wondered if they were in the company of Sub-Commander Darok.

At the door to Barracks 15, Julian stopped and turned to Martok. "I think it's best if you wait out here," he said soberly. "I don't know if I'll be welcome, but I think it's a safe bet that my patient won't want you looking on."

Martok looked displeased, but nodded. "I will watch through the door," he said. "If I suspect they pose a threat to you, I will enter and dispatch them."

Julian's lips twitched into a tired half-smile. Apparently he wasn't the only one feeling the lack of his usual vocation and eager to ply it. Guarding one Starfleet officer on a house call was a considerable comedown from leading vast fleets of warships, but Martok was taking his charge very seriously.

"I hope that won't be necessary," he said. "But thank you."

He reached for the panel and opened the door.

All six beds were occupied, the Cardassians wretched, huddled figures bundled in their thin blankets. It was the sixth day of orbital night, and the toll it was taking on these men was obvious. Tain was spared the unrelenting cold, because he could climb into the wall almost at will and warm himself near the circuitry. His compatriots had no such relief.

The man nearest the door on Julian's right raised his head groggily, blinking both sets of eyelids in an attempt to make sense of what he was seeing. Hoping to spare him too much bewilderment and maybe a fright, Julian spoke.

"I'm the Starfleet doctor," he said. "I'm here to look at your friend's dressing."

Puzzled disorientation faded into a scowl. "I know who you are, human," the Cardassian growled. "If you've come about Amcet's dressing, you're too late."

Julian felt his intestines shrivel within him. Horror and guilt assailed him, and for a moment he could not breathe. It couldn't be possible that he had lost  _another_  patient in this hateful place. The door shrieked closed behind him and he jumped, but he scarcely felt the reflex.

"What happened?" he said hoarsely. Already the part of his mind that lived to spin out grim scenarios had a ready supply of explanations: the artery had opened in the night, and he had bled to death; he had fainted from loss of blood during the count yesterday, and sustained a fatal beating; one of the guards had vaporized him just because they could.

The Cardassian made a disgusted sound and burrowed back under his blanket. "It came off," he said.

Julian was briefly flummoxed, completely uncomprehending. But the occupant of the third bed on the left — the same one Julian himself occupied in Barracks 6 — was stirring. As he raised his head, Julian recognized his patient and understood. He was too late to check on the dressing, not the man: the bandage had come off.

He was feeling a little weak-kneed with relief, and so he moved as swiftly as he dared to the second bench and sat down upon it, facing the last cot and the bleary-eyed, haggard Cardassian.

"I assumed they killed you," he said hoarsely, gathering his blanket around his shoulders as he sat up and swung his booted feet to the floor. "When you were absent from the count yesterday."

Apparently he hadn't observed the human in the line this morning, or maybe he had not even troubled to look. From the way the other Cardassian had spoken, and the sluggish movements Amcet made as he widened the set of his feet and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees, the lethargy born of the chill had a deep and pernicious hold.

"I had business with the other Vorta," Julian said, not without a hint of irony. More gravely, he asked, "How do you feel?"

Amcet curled his lip into a bitter sneer. He was young for a Cardassian officer: about Julian's age. "Much as I always feel," he said. "Unwell. Hungry. Cold."

That about summed up how the Dominion wanted them to exist, and Julian nodded his understanding before probing further. "When you say unwell, do you mean dizzy? Nauseous? Weak? Are you in pain? Fatigued?"

"All of that," Amcet agreed. Then he straightened, though it obviously cost him an effort. "Not weak," he amended guardedly.

"Of course not," Julian said. "I shouldn't have said that."

The Cardassian's eyes narrowed as if questing for signs of mockery. When he saw none, he relaxed a little. "You want to see this, I suppose?" he said, tilting his head to the side to provide a better angle from which Julian could examine his temple.

"Yes," said Julian, sliding to the edge of the bench and leaning in. "Thank you. I'm just going to touch you, so I can get a sense of how it's healing."

Amcet bared his teeth for a moment, but he nodded tightly and endured Julian's approach. He was obviously warring with his instincts, and Julian kept himself at the ready in case he needed to pull suddenly back to avoid snapping jaws. It seemed to be an impulse that the cold-ravaged Cardassians found hard to suppress. He looked at the wound, finding himself squinting against the gloom. This position wasn't really making the most of the limited light, and as his right forefinger grazed the grey, knobbled flesh, his left moved up reflexively to adjust Amcet's chin.

It stopped mid-air, paralyzed by the memory of Tiellyn's hold on his jaw. Julian rethought his approach. "Can you tilt your chin a little farther to the left? Back and up?" he asked instead.

Amcet obeyed, and Julian's visualization of the wound improved markedly. "Perfect," he murmured, studying it.

The ragged gash was clotted closed. The smaller wounds, where lesser fingers had torn into the flesh, were already healing. The only issue Julian could see was the twisted flap of dead skin over the place where the artery had torn. There was a pocket of fluid underneath, and when Julian pressed lightly with the tip of his finger, a bead of watery purulence oozed out. The infection was small and still in its infancy, but the risk of it progressing was considerable, and the consequences if it did could be dire.

"You've got a little infection here. Nothing to worry about: we've caught it early. This is going to sting, but only for a moment," Julian said. He braced the Cardassian's brow with his left hand and got a firm grip on the flap of skin with his right thumb and index finger. His overgrown nails were almost two millimetres past the quick now, and even when they were, as now, scrupulously clean from the sterilizer unit in the toilet facility, they felt maddeningly unsanitary. But they were perfect for this task: as effective as forceps, and considerably more precise. In one swift, studied movement, Julian ripped the flap of skin away from the Cardassian's head, baring the pocket of pus. It was the most primitive if debridements, but it worked.

Amcet hissed in surprise and pain, but he did not try to bite. Pinpricks of blood welled up from the immature skin suddenly bared to the air. Julian reached down by his hip and tore open the packet of sterile gauze. He used one corner to wick away the yellowish ooze, and then wetted the opposite side with the antiseptic solution. He swabbed the site thoroughly.

"That should do it," he said slowly, so that the sentence and his ministrations concluded at the same time. He withdrew his hands and slid back a little more securely onto the table. "It's best if we leave it uncovered. Bacteria don't like the cold any better than Cardassians do, and the open air will help keep the site dry."

Amcet was probing his wound with his fingertips, gingerly. "Curse the Jem'Hadar," he muttered. Then his eyes locked on Julian's face and he leaned in with a glint of savagery in his eyes. "People are saying you ripped the White tube right out of one of their throats," he said. "They put a human in the ring, thinking you'd be a soft target, and you won three fights!"

Julian didn't want to dwell on that, but neither was he going to take credit for something he had not done. "I won two fights," he said. "The Second dispatched me quickly in my third."

"But the other part's true, isn't it?" Amcet suddenly looked much younger, and desperately eager. "Right out of its neck?"

Julian closed his eyes and sucked in a steadying breath. "Yes," he confirmed flatly. "Right out of his neck."

The Cardassian made a noise of visceral satisfaction. "It's about time one of us took back something of our own," he said. "The whole prison's been talking about it."

"I wish they wouldn't," said Julian. "I really don't want anyone remembering that, least of all the guards."

"Oh, they'll remember," said Amcet with relish. "You watch. They won't be in such a hurry to fight you again."

Julian thought the opposite might be true. He was quite sure the Second would like another crack at him, as soon as Tiellyn's prohibition on his life was lifted. He wondered if she would remove that dubious protection now that she had her samples, or if she had ordered Deyos to "preserve the specimen" in case these, too, returned inexplicable results and she needed to collect a third set. In her place, Julian would want the latter. Then again, he would never truly be in her place, would he?

"I'd appreciate it if you do what you can to stop that kind of talk," he said, folding in the stained corners of the gauze and using its centre to blot away the fresh scrim of blood rising from his patient's temple. "I don't want to draw any more attention to myself than absolutely necessary."

"Too late," someone snickered. It was the Cardassian in the next cot. Julian glanced towards him dismissively, and was about to look away when his keen eyes caught sight of something noteworthy.

"Your neck," Julian said, sliding down to the other side of the bench and leaning forward. "May I have a look?"

"What is it?" the man grunted.

"That flaking around your scales," Julian said. "I've seen it before, on another Cardassian prisoner. Is it irritation from your clothes? Chafing from the blanket?"

The scales on this man's neck were dry and peeling, just like those on Enabran Tain's back and chest. The pattern was virtually identical.

"I don't know," the man growled as Julian reached out, stopping just short of touching the ridge of auxiliary vertebrae. "It itches."

"Yes, it looks like it would," Julian said thoughtfully. "May I feel it?"

The Cardassian raised his head from the pillow and glared blackly at Julian. " _Feel it_?" he snarled. "My  _neck_?"

"Just the affected area," said Julian, too drawn in to the diagnostic puzzle to take much affront at the man's tone. "I can judge a lot about a dermatological condition by its texture."

The man made a disgusted noise, but flopped back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. "Suit yourself, human," he said. "I'm not about to deny the man who tore a Jem'Hadar's throat open with his bare hands."

That was an unexpected boon from an ugly ordeal. Julian didn't pause to dwell on that, but used the sensitive tips of his first two fingers to feel the area of flaking skin. It was rough and brittle, almost as if the cell membranes themselves were breaking down.

"Have you ever had this kind of irritation before?" Julian asked, once again wishing his research into Cardassian physiology had progressed beyond what he had thought likely to encounter in Garak. He hadn't done any reading on allergic dermatitis or other related conditions, but if this  _was_  dermatitis, or the Cardassian equivalent of eczema, it didn't bear much resemblance to the human varieties. "Or is it just since you've come to the camp?"

"It's only been a problem for the last few months," the man said irately. "Three or four."

"It is  _taret rol_." Another voice, grim and gravelled, came from the opposite bed. Its occupant was pushing himself slowly up into a sitting position, dour eyes fixed on the human invader. He was the eldest of the sextet: the one who had given Julian their barracks number on the day Amcet had fallen in the ring.

Julian twisted to meet his gaze. "What's that?" he asked.

"The flesh of hunger," the man said. "His skin is starting to break down. These young men, they do not remember the famines. I do. After a time, the flakes appear. Then fissures. Then the flesh grows too raw to be touched, too raw even to endure the weight of garments. By then, there are other more urgent problems. Sores on the gums, dysentery, delirium."

Julian glanced back at the man he had been examining. He was staring at his comrade in horror. "Why did you not tell me this when I first complained of the rash?" he demanded. "You knew what it was, and you said nothing?"

"What good would it do to tell you?" the older Cardassian argued bitterly. "There is nothing to be done about it. We're at the mercy of the Dominion, and they do not care to feed us properly." To Julian he explained; "The winter I was fourteen, there was widespread starvation in Culat. My family lived for seven months on rulot gruel and the occasional yamok. My mother developed  _taret rol_  before the twilight of the year. By spring, she was dead."

Julian's eyes travelled back to the flaking scales. "She died of this?" he asked. "Or of starvation more generally?"

"She died because she divided her portion amongst us more often than she ate it herself," spat the aging soldier. " _Taret rol_  alone kills slowly. I had the first signs myself before the voles came out in spring."

These were painful and highly personal remembrances, and Julian did not know if the man wanted to be questioned further in front of his cellmates. But he had been the one to initiate the conversation, and there were things Julian needed to know. "Was the end of the voles' hibernation period related to relieving your symptoms?" he asked, trying to phrase the question delicately.

The man's eyes narrowed. "Was it  _what_?" he asked.

"Did your family eat the voles?" Julian asked, far more bluntly.

The look of scorn the man gave him was positively scalding. "Of course we ate the voles, human!" he snapped disdainfully. "In those days, the labouring poor did not turn up their noses at meat. Any meat."

"I wouldn't turn my nose up at meat right now, either," muttered Amcet, chafing his palm against his knee. "I haven't tasted a good, tender piece of flesh since that last night aboard ship."

Julian's own mouth watered in sympathy with that statement. It had only been a couple of weeks since his own last decent meal, but already he craved any number of things he was used to being able to enjoy as a matter of course. He ignored the biological urge, however, and focused on the puzzle.

"Did you know of other people who experienced this condition…  _taret rol_ … without dying of it?" Julian asked. "People who were eating a restricted but calorically sufficient diet?"

"In those days, no one's diet was sufficient!" growled the Cardassian. Then he relented. "Yes. It appeared in those who had been too long without meat. When they ate flesh again, it would resolve. The ones who died ate too little of anything to sustain life for long. They were dark years on Cardassia."

Garak rarely talked about the widespread famines and the desperate dissipation that had led to the Cardassian Union's voracious expansionist policies and, among other outrages, the annexation of resource-rich and agrarian Bajor. What Julian knew of those decades had largely come from his reading on the context of the Occupation.

"It sounds like  _taret rol_  is some sort of nutritional deficiency," he said. "If your mother contracted it in just a few months, then clearly the diet here provides at least some of whatever it is your bodies need; it's just not enough. You've all been here for almost two years, and if the symptoms are just appearing now…"

"That is a faulty assumption," said the older Cardassian scornfully. "My mother was malnourished for years before that last winter. Never until I enlisted did I leave the table satisfied after a meal, and she ate less than any of us."

"She sounds like a very loving woman," Julian said quietly, wanting to express his empathy for this man's bitter childhood but wary of overstepping the boundaries prescribed by Cardassian culture. "Very noble. Brave."

"Ensuring the survival of the next generation is every parent's duty to the State," the man said, casting his gaze away.

Julian was familiar enough with Garak's guarded emotions to see this evasion for what it was: an expression of deep anguish and profound admiration. This man hallowed the memory of his mother, and rightly so.

"I need to look into this further," Julian said. "For the moment there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger — unless you're having other symptoms? Abdominal cramps or unformed stools?"

He addressed these questions to the man with the flaking scales. He scowled at the doctor, and then shook his head. "No. Only the hunger pangs. They feed us too little to satisfy an invalid, much less a soldier."

Amcet looked uneasy. "Don't complain, Borak," he muttered. "Haven't you been listening?"

"He's allowed to complain," Julian said, palming his vial of disinfectant and climbing carefully to his feet. His flank ached as he rose, and the room tipped rapidly to the left, but he was getting used to the postural dizziness by now and he rode it out smoothly. "Others may have endured with less, but what we're given isn't enough to keep us healthy — clearly. And the Dominion could provide more generous rations if they wanted to. I'm going to do some investigation into this. If you're amenable, I'll come back in a day or two to take another look, and maybe examine the rest of you."

He looked around, but the other three Cardassians were either asleep or hovering in a semiconscious fog of grinding cold. They made no sign that they had heard. Amcet, though, was nodding, and the man suffering from  _taret rol_  watched him anxiously.

"We'll get to the bottom of this," Julian promised him quietly. "I just need a little time."

The barracks elder snorted skeptically, but did not question his assertion.

 _(fade_ )

"You are very quiet," Martok said as they crossed the atrium on their way back to Barracks 6. "What came to pass in that room? You spoke at length with the Cardassians."

"There's something missing from our diet," Julian said. "The mush they feed us isn't nutritionally complete. One of the Cardassians identified a problem some of them are experiencing as a sign of malnutrition. And your first cellmate, the Dosi. Those symptoms — edema, nystagmus, laboured breathing, heart failure — they sound a lot like a human ailment called beriberi, which is the result of a vitamin deficiency. I know our food has  _that_  particular vitamin, because I can taste it. But something else is absent or inadequate to maintain health, at least in some of the species who are relying on it."

"I see." Martok's words were curiously flat, and his face had a strangely guarded expression as he turned into the barracks pod.

"General?" Julian said. When the Klingon tried to look away, he reached to grab his sleeve, drawing him back. Julian's eyes narrowed as he studied the weatherbeaten face. "Are you experiencing something similar? Or a skin rash, unusual flaking and pruritus — and itchiness?"

"Nothing like that," Martok said. He looked up and down the corridor, reassuring himself they were alone. "It is a… personal matter," he muttered. "It has been going on for some time now."

"How long?" Julian asked, suspecting that he knew what the symptom in question must be. "Days? Weeks?"

"Two months." Martok ground out the words, avoiding Julian's eyes.

"Are they loosely formed, or liquid?" Julian asked. He was thinking about what the Cardassian had said: dysentery.

Martok frowned at him, surprised. " _What?_ " he said.

Julian shook his head. "Your…" He realized then that he had made the classic error of empirical exobiology, and fallen into an assumption based on his experience with some other species. "Tell me what you're experiencing, please," he said instead.

Again, Martok did a sweep for observers. The only person in sight was the nearest Jem'Hadar guard, standing near the pillar that overhung the arena. Martok turned his back judiciously, so that their foe could not see as he took hold of his upper lip and peeled it back. Over the line of fearsome fangs, his gum was speckled with a strand of small, glossy red sores like beaded rubies on the spongy surface. He let Julian get a good look, and then released his hold and let his mouth resume its usual grim line.

"They will heal, and then break out afresh in some new spot," Martok murmured, the words sawing out bitterly. "I am almost grateful for the slop they serve us. The writhing of good gagh would be intolerable against the sores."

Julian nodded, but did not comment. Skin degradation and flaking scales in Cardassians, lesions on the gums in Klingons. A Dosi with peripheral and pulmonary edema. It looked like he had a medical mystery on his hands. He was going to have to conduct a comprehensive survey of the prisoner population. Surely with enough data, he would be able to formulate a working hypothesis and figure out what was absent from their diet.

A thin smile touched his lips. Martok's eye narrowed in puzzlement. "What is it, Doctor?" he asked.

"It's nothing," said Julian. "Only… I was just lying there before, reflecting on how little I have to occupy my mind. I think I've found something."

Martok tossed his head appreciatively and made a noise that was almost a snort of amusement. "Well, then, Doctor," he said; "ask all the questions you must."

 _(fade to black_ )


	41. Teaser: The Off-Watch

**Part VIII, Teaser: The Off-Watch**

The whine of the thrusters seemed to hum through the deck plating as the  _Defiant_  came to an abrupt halt. At the helm, Dax leaned forward over her control panel, slender fingers flying competently. "Adjusting the polarity of the scan," she announced. "Attempting to identify trajectory."

Captain Benjamin Sisko sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. This was the third time in six hours they had lost Major Kira's ion trail. The polaron field she had used to mask it was unreliable at high speeds, but whereever the runabout had dropped below Warp 6, the residual emissions had faded to a sensor shadow, and they had to stop and recalibrate. Dax seemed to have infinite patience for the challenge, which was good, because Benjamin certainly did  _not_.

He was angry: angry at the assassin who had already killed five people by incredibly sophisticated methods, angry with Kira for charging off on this personal vendetta to find him, angry with Odo for failing to make a duplicate of the list of suspects she had stolen, and with Doctor Bashir for leaving her unattended in the Infirmary so that she could sneak off in the first place. Most of all, Ben was angry with himself for failing to anticipate that she would try to take matters into her own hands. She was a stubborn, driven, positively fearless woman. Of course she hadn't been content to lie in the Infirmary, waiting to be slaughtered as her friends had been. Why hadn't he known she'd try something like this?

"Hurry it up, Old Man," Ben muttered, frowning at the starscape on the viewscreen. They were right at the edge of the Demilitarized Zone: not an ideal place to bring a warship. Finding Kira before she ran afoul of the person preying on the former members of the Shakaar resistance was the priority, of course, but Ben also didn't want to spend any more time in this debatable area of space than he had to. Worf had mustered a skeleton crew in the ten minutes allotted to him to prepare the  _Defiant_ for departure, but that still meant there were twenty-six lives in Sisko's hands as he hunted for his errant first officer. He'd rather avoid a skirmish with Cardassian patrols if at all possible.

"I'm doing my best, Benjamin," Jadzia said calmly. Her eyes were fixed on her console. "Kira knew what she was doing. We're lucky we've been able to track her this far."

Ben knew that was true. They'd followed the runabout's fragmented signature to two different star systems already. In each, presumably, lived one of the suspects on the vanished list. Odo was below, trying to reconstruct it, but it wasn't as simple as requisitioning another copy. He had pieced together twenty-five names by calling in favours with any number of contacts in the Cardassian Union. Benjamin didn't know how he'd done it, but it was becoming obvious that few of his sources were willing to be contacted again so soon. They were unlikely to obtain a list of Kira's likely targets in time. Good old-fashioned woodscraft seemed the only chance of finding her, and Dax was scenting for spoor.

"I'm going to try recalibrating the sensor array," she said now, pivoting in her chair as she rose and moved to the fore science station. She slid into the seat, hands already dancing over the control panel. "This may take some time."

Behind him, Ben heard the hiss of the main door. Heavy boots clunked on the deck plating, and a figure with perfectly erect, military posture stepped into his periphery. "Lieutenant Commander Worf, reporting for the second watch, Captain."

"Report to Tactical, Mister Worf," Sisko said curtly. He knew what his Strategic Operations Officer thought he was reporting for, but if he expected the Captain to leave the Bridge now, he was sadly mistaken.

"Sir?" said Worf. Sisko shot him a frosty look, and the Klingon inclined his head tightly. "Aye, sir."

Dax had turned in her chair, and she was staring at him with that piercing, knowing gaze that always made Ben want to squirm. Somehow, with that look she always managed to bring him right back to his first day on board the  _Livingston_ , when he'd run afoul of the Special Envoy attached to the vessel, the primary mission of which had been First Contact.

"Captain," she said, almost conversationally; "unless I'm mistaken, this is the end of your third consecutive watch."

Ben glared at her. The other officers were listening intently. At the Engineering station, Crewman Stevens had gone very still. They had left Deep Space Nine forty-one hours ago, and it was true that he had only taken two watches away from the Bridge in that time — he hadn't really been able to sleep either, at least not deeply. But he wasn't likely to sleep now, was he? He might as well be at his post.

"Never mind that, Commander," he said levelly. "What's the status of the sensor array?"

"Recalibrating," she reported with an impish little curl of the lip. How she could remain so unflappable in a situation like this, Ben did not know. It was simultaneously admirable and extremely aggravating. "There's no way to rush this, sir. It takes as long as it takes."

 _It takes as long as it takes_. How often had he heard that one? It was one of his father's favourite salvos, designed to shoot down complaints from impatient kitchen help or overeager diners. Dax knew that, of course. And she knew that in his four decades of life, Ben had not yet devised a worthy rebuttal.

"You might as well go below and get something to eat," she said, spinning in her chair to turn her back to him as though the matter was closed. "We'll keep you updated."

She didn't have the authority to order him off his own Bridge, even if she did know all the tricks to making him feel backfooted and pointlessly willful. "That won't be necessary, Commander," he said. "Stevens, can you do anything to boost the signal?"

"I can try, Captain," the young engineer said. "Diverting power from secondary systems."

"We've got it from here, Benjamin," Jadzia sang pointedly, still not looking at him. "If you like, I could ask Doctor Bashir to come up to offer a second opinion."

Ben felt his jaw tighten. Damn Dax and her stubborn streak!  _She_  couldn't remove him from the Bridge, so she threatened to call the one person who could. Ben didn't doubt the Doctor would do it, either. It wouldn't take much to diagnose his fatigue, and it had only been eight days since Bashir had put Ben under the knife… well, the neural repolarizing laser. Sisko knew he was lucky he'd been allowed to return to active duty so promptly. He couldn't push his luck.

"Mister Worf, you have the Bridge," he said grudgingly, gripping the arms of the command chair as he heaved himself to his feet. It required greater exertion than he'd anticipated. Apparently he really  _was_  overtired. "Dax, I expect an update as soon as you pick up her trajectory again. If it keeps us in neutral space, follow at maximum warp. If it leads into the Demilitarized Zone, we're going to have to reassess."

"Aye, Captain," Dax said neatly. "Crewman, see if you can stabilize that duotronic fluctuation: it's giving me artefact on this end."

"Acknowledged, Commander," said Stevens. "Stabilizing."

Worf was settling in the command chair, taking a broad stance and studying the output on his starboard panel. "Is there any interference from the gas giant?" he asked.

"Only in the sense that it's probably what slowed her down," Dax said, shaking her head in rueful exasperation. "When this is over, we ought to look into affixing some kind of tracking device to all the runabouts."

"Had such a device been in use, Major Kira would simply have disabled or removed it," said Worf.

Ben moved into the range of the door's sensor. Its hiss almost covered Jadzia's huff of annoyance. "I was joking, Worf," she said. Then she muttered, "Mostly."

Her hands were dancing nimbly over the console again. She seemed to have everything well in hand. There really wasn't anything else Ben could do up here, and his old friend was right about one thing: after nineteen and a half hours on the Bridge, food  _did_ seem like a good idea.

Ben reconsidered when he walked into the  _Defiant's_  mess hall and saw that the only other person there was the one man on board he least wanted to see. Doctor Bashir was settled at a corner table, a half-demolished chicken salad in front of him. He was studying a PADD, but at the sound of the door he looked up and smiled.

"Captain!" he said pleasantly. "I was hoping for some company. Care to join me?"

Sisko went to the replicator. "Ham and cheese sandwich, extra mustard, a side of greens with sesame vinaigrette, and a raktajino, hot," he said. The  _Defiant's_  replicators were far more reliable now than they had been when he first collected her from Utopia Planitia, but it was still best to keep orders simple and adhere to the fixed menu.

The food appeared, and he removed the tray from the replicator. There didn't seem to be a way to avoid accepting the Doctor's invitation, so Ben settled in the seat across from him. He raised the mug to his lips almost before he was settled, hoping the caffeine would reach his brain quickly enough to hide the telltale signs of exhaustion.

"How's the search coming?" Bashir asked. "We've stopped again — lost the trail?"

"For now," Sisko agreed. "Dax will find it."

"Of course she will," the Doctor said, and he smiled as he set aside his PADD. "She's the best there is. Do you think the trail will take us into the Demilitarized Zone?"

"I hope not," Ben said grimly. "If it does, I don't see that we'll have much choice but to follow it. At least we can do so under cloak."

"I imagine the Cardassians wouldn't take kindly to a warship in the DMZ." Bashir nodded sagely. "And I don't suppose it would do much good to explain to them what we're doing out here. A major in the Bajoran militia, hunting down a killer who's probably a Cardassian…"

Benjamin frowned. There was something not quite right about the younger man's tone of voice. It was too light, almost flippant. "Doctor?" he said. "This is a very serious situation."

Earnest brown eyes locked with his. "I know that, Captain," said Bashir, suddenly sombre. "But it doesn't seem like I can do any good fretting over it. What's the point in being miserable?"

Ben sighed and picked up half of his sandwich. "There's no point, I suppose," he said. "I still can't seem to help it. I didn't ask before, and I probably should have… just what is Major Kira's situation? Medically."

Bashir sat back in his chair. His lips rippled as he ran his tongue over his teeth ruefully. "Medically, she was sound the last time I saw her," he said. "I stopped the hemorrhage and repaired the placental laceration. I would have liked to have kept her under observation over night, and ideally she would have been put on light duty for the duration of the pregnancy. That'll be my recommendation once we get her back to the station, assuming we find her in the same condition I left her."

Ben glanced up from his food, mildly surprised to hear the Doctor say this so straightforwardly. The implication was, of course, that they might  _not_  find Kira in the same condition in which the Doctor had last seen her. She might be gravely injured, either by the killer she had gone to hunt or by some further strain upon her very pregnant body. She might even be dead. It was the sort of thing Julian usually did not say outright: Ben would have expected him to trail off after "assuming", hoping that his captain would piece together the rest before he actually had to speak the words.

"But she  _was_  fit to be ambulatory?" he pressed. "When you left her in the Infirmary?"

Bashir nodded. "Essentially, yes. I expect she was still in some discomfort. Tissue repair of that kind is draining, and she'd had a bad shock on top of the trauma."

"And what are the chances of another laceration?" asked Sisko. All these questions probed for the sort of information ordinarily covered under doctor-patient confidentiality — the secrets an ethical physician was compelled to protect from third parties. However, the command structure of Starfleet provided exceptions to the absolutes of confidentiality, and this was one: where the life of a subordinate was directly imperilled, and the success of the mission relied on having the necessary information, the Chief Medical Officer had a duty to report the pertinent details to his Captain.

"That depends," Bashir admitted. He picked up his neglected fork and stabbed at his salad. "If she exerts herself for too long, or too intensely, or in the wrong way, it's possible. The vascular tissue surrounding the Bajoran placenta is durable, but it's also vastly more complex than anything human uteri develop. There's a lot that can go wrong with it."

Ben's eyes flicked to the PADD, lying face up on the table. He expected to see Bajoran physiology, or perhaps Major Kira's medical records. Instead, a familiar geometric form was displayed on the screen, with a block of text below it: a circle, divided into twenty wedges of alternating colours. Ben frowned and nodded at the device.

"Darts?" he asked quizzically.

Bashir glanced at the PADD, looking rather guilty. "Oh," he said flatly. "Yes." He flipped the device over, planting it face-down as if he could expunge the sight from Ben's memory by removing it from view. "I was… you know. It's a distraction."

Ben nodded, taking another bite of his sandwich and forcing himself to chew it thoroughly. He understood the concept of distracting oneself from a painful problem, particularly at a time like this when Bashir had to be feeling every bit as helpless as Ben himself. Both of them were surplus to requirements right now, when the success of the hunt rested on Dax's capable shoulders. Until they actually  _found_  Kira, there was nothing either of them could do for her. And yet… was a treatise on darts really much of a distraction?

"I guess I just assumed you'd learned everything you need to know about the game years ago," Ben said.

Julian smiled thinly. "It never hurts to brush up," he said.

Sisko tried to think of something to say, preferably something competently consoling or, failing that, something inconsequential. He couldn't. He sighed and set down his sandwich, wiping his fingers forcefully on the napkin.

"Why did you leave her unattended in the Infirmary?" he asked. The question was out before he knew he was forming it, blunt and unmistakably accusatory.

Bashir blinked at him, no doubt blindsided. "Sir?" he said.

"Why did you leave a patient who'd just had surgery, a patient whose friends had just been murdered in her quarters, unattended in your Infirmary?" Ben demanded. He was dismayed by the tone of his voice, but he couldn't seem to rein it in. All his aimless anger, its righteous target still unknown, seemed to be funnelling into his words now. He feared that Doctor Bashir might shrink away, withdrawing into himself in the face of his Captain's obvious displeasure.

He didn't. He regarded him calmly, raised his eyebrows slightly, and said; "I didn't leave her unattended. I left her with Odo. He wanted a quiet word with her, and I thought it best to give them privacy. I stepped outside. It's as simple as that. It was a miscalculation on my part. I expected her to rest when he left her, not to run."

No excuses. No apology. No sign of remorse or regret or recrimination. No attempt to deflect blame. Just a measured explanation of his rationale, and clear identification of his error. Sisko wished he possessed half that clarity about his own mistakes in this matter.

But then, Julian had been remarkably serene lately. The memories out of those days of divine clarity after his accident in the holosuite were hazy, but one stood out very intensely in Ben's mind. Wandering up the Promenade on his way to the Infirmary, overwhelmed with sudden insight into the minds of those around him. He could see the turmoil in their hearts: anxieties, fears, burdens, pains, wounds of the spirit both old and fresh, scarred over and still bleeding. He stopped where he could to offer his insight, his guidance, and his words gave solace:  _There's no need to worry. The katterpod harvest will be much better this year… You don't belong here: go home…_

He had faltered, then, and they had come running to his side: Doctor Bashir and Admiral Whatley. Ben had read his heart and beheld there a private pain his old friend had not seen fit to confide in him.  _Your son. You can stop worrying about him: he forgives you_. It had been so clear: not only the pain and the reason behind it, but the truth that would heal it. It was only later on, in the myopic emptiness after the surgery, that Ben had paused to realize that while he'd seen the hurricanes in the hearts of many people that day, all he had sensed when he looked at his Chief Medical Officer was cool serenity and a sense of unwavering purpose.

It was strange, because in years past Ben would have told anyone who asked that there was something about Julian that spoke of a tempestuous inner life. There had always seemed to be an unidentifiable shadow in his heart that haunted him, a driving force that could rear up to seize him like a man ridden by demons. It didn't show often, well-concealed beneath a ready smile and a cocky demeanour and impeccable professional competence. But sometimes, when things went wrong, the cheerful façade would crack, and give a glimpse of what lay beneath.

Ben had seen it in the Sanctuary District, on that first night trapped in 2024 when he'd had to exert every ounce of strength in his broad-shouldered body to restrain the slender and far lighter man from springing to the aid of a helpless victim of the ghosts. He had seen it in the glassy, exhausted eyes when he had come across his CMO at his desk in the middle of the night, still striving to find a cure for the Teplan Blight despite his successful creation of an  _in utero_  innoculant. He had seen it in this very mess hall when Julian, who should have been in sickbay having his healing arm attended to, had cornered him with the intention of flinging himself on the spears of his Captain's displeasure, convinced Sisko blamed and loathed him for taking Jake to Ajilon Prime. It was partly a horror of failure and misjudgement, Sisko had always understood that. But there had been something more, too; as if these hurdles and imperfections rocked the very core of his identity and left him feeling less human, instead of more so.

Whatever it was or had been, Ben hadn't seen it on the Promenade that day, and he didn't see it now. This was exactly the sort of lapse in judgement that would have driven Julian to self-castigation a few months before. Now he seemed to accept that he had made a mistake, but it couldn't be helped, and there was no sense in flagellating himself over it. It was a healthier way to cope with personal error, surely far better for Julian's mental wellbeing. And yet somehow, it made Ben uneasy.

That was foolish, he told himself. The ill-concealed self-loathing he had glimpsed in Julian after the rescue from Ajilon Prime had frightened and dismayed him. If it was gone, that was surely a good thing. Ben sighed softly and took another sip of raktajino, conscious of how long silence had lapsed between them. It had to be almost a minute since Doctor Bashir had given his cool assessment of his actions, and his Captain had yet to respond.

"I'm glad you realize it was a miscalculation," he said. "We've all made more than a few in the last couple of days. Odo shouldn't have left her alone, either. And  _I_  should have expected her to try something like this."

Julian was chewing thoughtfully. Apparently his appetite wasn't affected any more than his sense of self-worth was. He really had found a healthier place in his heart, it seemed. He swallowed and said; "I admit I find Major Kira's behaviour difficult to predict."

There was something so clinical about that observation, so nearly Vulcan, in fact, that Ben couldn't help a rueful little chuckle. "That's one way to put it," he agreed. He shook his head. "I was just starting to think we'd seen the last of these escapades."

"Really?" Bashir said dryly. " _Why_?"

He had a point there, but Ben didn't really have an answer. He picked up his sandwich again and stared at it for a moment before forcing himself to take a bite. "Have you spoken with Chief O'Brien since we left the station?" he asked.

The Doctor grimaced. "Once," he said. "He's not very pleased with any of us at the moment."

Sisko wasn't surprised to hear this. The daily reports from the station had been curt and factual. The fact that O'Brien had not been in contact over subspace except in writing was clear evidence of his anger. He was afraid of what he might say to his commanding officer if they spoke face-to-face, and so he was avoiding the temptation. Ben appreciated the nod to professionalism, but he knew he'd have a tough conversation to come home to.

"Including him on the mission was out of the question, Doctor," Ben said, trying to convince himself as much as Bashir. "He's too close to this. Major Kira's not just a colleague to the Chief; she's family now. His child's in danger. That kind of personal involvement can compromise decision-making in critical situations."

He had been expecting an argument, some impassioned defence of Chief O'Brien's right to be as close to the action as possible at a time like this. Instead, Bashir nodded thoughtfully.

"I agree," he said. "I tried to tell him that. He wasn't very interested in what I had to say: for the most part, he just shouted."

"Oh." Ben deflated a little, relieved at least for now of the need to defend his actions. He went on regardless. "Someone on the senior staff should be on the station, anyway. With the tensions with the Dominion…"

That was a feeble excuse, and he knew it. Only a few months ago, he'd left Sergeant Latara and Lieutenant Neeley in command of Deep Space Nine while the entire senior staff made what had been essentially a diplomatic run to Cardassia Prime to recover the Orb of Time. On that occasion, not only had they all left the sector but, unexpectedly, the century! Starfleet Command had been too relieved by the fact that the  _Defiant's_  crew had managed to prevent an act of potentially catastrophic temporal sabotage to question why the mission had required the presence of every department head. They wouldn't have questioned it this time, either. Unless, of course, something went terribly wrong on the station in their absence, and honestly Ben did not anticipate that.

"You don't need to convince me, sir," Bashir said affably. He was finished his salad now, and he sipped his tea as he nodded at Sisko's plate. "Aren't you hungry? You're eating very slowly."

Ben forced himself to take another bite. Here it was: the inevitable series of questions about his welfare. He'd known he wouldn't be able to hide his fatigue from the physician, and he really shouldn't have tried. It had just seemed too suspect, not to mention rude, to turn around and leave the mess hall as soon as he saw the man. Benjamin knew from experience how this would go. Where Dax would simply call him on his behaviour and cajole him into taking care of himself, Doctor Bashir would grow concerned, then probing, and finally insistent. If need be, he could be positively imperious.

"Replicated ham never tastes quite  _right_. Have you ever noticed that?" he tried instead, a diversionary tactic.

"I don't order ham from the replicator," said Bashir. He made it sound like a line read from a child's primer, or off a cargo manifest. Then he shrugged and added, more conversationally; "I don't have a strong opinion on the matter."

Ben chuckled. "Ham doesn't rate as high as beets, then? Not worthy of a strong opinion."

Bashir grinned a little too broadly, almost triumphantly. "Beets are a special case, sir," he said.

The first time Benjamin had cooked for his senior staff, he had run up against the young doctor's aversion to beets. He remembered the sudden, hunted look on Julian's face when Jake had detailed the menu, and the tight, visceral dislike in his voice as he had strived to be polite. Odo, fascinated by the rituals of food preparation despite the fact Changelings didn't eat, had studied the roots intently as Ben held up a spoonful for Bashir's dismayed perusal. He'd made a valiant effort to eat them later on, too, though it had been obvious he hadn't enjoyed the experience. Ben had appreciated his Chief Medical Officer's good manners, but ever since, he had judiciously left beets off the menu whenever Julian was on the guest list.

Still, it didn't hurt to tease a little, and it was a welcome release of pent-up tension. Ben was just about to make another riposte on behalf of his favourite misunderstood vegetable, when there was a low, rumbling hum and a shimmy in the deck plates. The whole ship vibrated around them: they were going to warp.

Ben smacked his communicator. "Sisko to Bridge, report!" he said.

Worf's deep voice rippled through the airwaves. "We have identified the Major's ion trail again, Captain. Bearing 167 mark 203 — still safely out of the Demilitarized Zone. We have resumed pursuit."

"Glad to hear it, Mister Worf," said Benjamin. "Give my compliments to Lieutenant Commander Dax and Mister Stevens, would you?"

"Yes, Captain," said Worf. After a moment's silence he added, rigidly professional; "I recommend that you stay below for the duration of this watch. I will keep you apprised of further developments."

Sisko couldn't help a small, wry smile at this not-so-subtle evidence of Jadzia's hand at work. "Recommendation noted and taken, Commander," he said. "I'll be in my berth if I'm needed."

"Understood, Captain. Bridge out."

The comm went dead, and Sisko looked down at his half-eaten meal. Across from him, Doctor Bashir was once more focused on his tea. Ben picked up the sandwich again. He could delay his retirement to his bunk for a few more minutes. He  _did_  need to eat, after all.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	42. An Ordinary Soldier

**Part VIII, Act I: An Ordinary Soldier**

The house-call had sapped most of Julian's energy. Heavy with fatigue, he stretched out gratefully on his unyielding cot and promptly fell asleep. He awoke to the now-familiar sounds of Enabran Tain extracting himself from the wall, and went to take care of his body's excretory needs before curfew. Urinating was painful, the deep and pernicious fire not only in his kidney but his ureter and bladder as well. When Julian returned to the barracks, he was clammy and shaking, and all too ready to leave the pain behind again in slumber.

He next came to in the dead of night, while all the others were still and quiet around him. Ordinarily, Julian dreaded such uninterrupted silence, because it was then the dark thoughts assailed him like a horde Viking warriors charging Dubgall's Bridge: swift, savage and pitiless. Tonight, however, he welcomed the quiet and the absence of distractions. He had to work on his experimental methodology.

A comprehensive survey of the nutritional deficiencies in a population of two hundred was a relatively small undertaking. With a well-equipped facility and a couple of experienced assistants, Julian would have made it the work of an afternoon. Working alone with a tricorder and a hematology kit, he could have gathered all the necessary data in two days. Here, he was going to have to rely on thorough physical examinations and comprehensive interviews. He didn't have a computer into which he might input his findings. He didn't even have a pad of paper and a pencil so he might jot them down. Everything he learned, he would have to remember, catalogue and collate in his mind alone. While he knew that he was up to the task, Julian was also aware that in order to ensure any kind of useful arrangement of data, he was going to need a clearly defined rubric for its collection.

The physiological differences between the various species represented in the prison posed an interesting challenge. Organ systems and nutritional needs were very different from world to world. His level of baseline knowledge varied considerably, too. In the end, Julian decided he would need a different order of operations for each of the species with which he was familiar: Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, Karemma, Hunter. A sixth protocol would have to be adapted to those species he had no prior experience with. And there would be a few, like the Breen, with whom Julian couldn't communicate and whom he wouldn't be able to examine properly. That idea rankled him, but he was going to have to learn to let it go: there was no help for it.

He knew there would be those among the prisoners who would decline to participate. That was understandable and acceptable: an ethically run study required voluntary, informed consent. All Julian could do was ask. He had the tacit agreement of half the population of Barracks 15, which was a good start on the Cardassians. Martok had consented, of course, although Julian had pressed him no further today. Kalenna was ready to submit to the interview and examination process whenever he wished. What had surprised Julian was the readiness with which Parvok had agreed. He had needed no persuading, no arch look from his superior. He had not even asked questions. He had simply said, earnestly; "Yes, whatever you need."

Julian hadn't yet raised the matter with Tain, though the aged Cardassian had probably heard every word inside the wall. He hadn't felt up to explanations before curfew, nor was he interested in the inevitable naysaying. There were enough obstacles to this project as it was. He wasn't just hampered by his lack of diagnostic equipment: he would also have to make do without the databases and physiology resources that would have simplified the diagnostic process.

Thirty seconds with his Infirmary computer would have told Julian everything he needed to know about  _taret rol_ : the underlying deficiency that caused the symptoms, its pathological profile, the appropriate doses of the missing nutrient to effect a rapid recovery. The older Cardassian had linked the disappearance of the condition with the end of the vole hibernation cycle and the return of meat to his family's diet. That might be true, but not necessarily. If spring in the city of Culat was anything like spring on worlds with which Julian was more familiar, awakening animals weren't the only source of seasonal food. Fresh greens sprouted even in urban environments, for example. He would have to investigate the possibility that the vole meat was the curative factor, but he couldn't assume.

That was the other thing he would have used his databases for, of course: nutritional analysis. Julian had no idea of the food value of a Cardassian vole: his only research into the creatures had been related to Miles O'Brien's efforts to quell the station's infestation. Having seen — and smelled — the hideous, oversized creatures, Julian couldn't imagine the desperation that might drive a person to eat one, or to serve it to their children. Then again, as his stomach wrenched in empty longing, perhaps he could.

He turned his mind to an analysis of the mush the prisoners were served each day. It provided all three basic caloric sources: carbohydrate in the grain, protein in the legumes, and fat in the oil that gave it the bland, rancid undertaste. There was no way of telling whether the protein supplied all of the essential amino acids — those that a body could not produce independently. Julian ran through them quickly, by species. Human adults required histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine. Klingons required those nine, as well as arginine and tyrosine. If Romulans had the same nutritional needs as Vulcans (which  _was_ an assumption, but hardly an unfounded one, given their many other metabolic similarities), their bodies could synthesize everything but histidine, isoleucine, leucine, and ornithine.

Cardassians could produce their own methionine, but in addition to the eight other essential amino acids needed by humans, they also required one called noratinine that had not evolved on Earth. All other things being equal, that would have made it a prime suspect for Julian's missing nutrient — except that the Cardassian who had identified the skin condition had specifically mentioned his family's diet during that long-ago winter had included yamok. Yamok was a significant, even excessive, source of noratinine. In fact, the undigestible amino acid was responsible for the gastrointestinal irritation that made yamok sauce so unpopular with humans. Even an occasional yamok in the diet of rulot gruel the Cardassian described would have been enough to stave off frank deficiency.

Then again, Julian reflected, he hadn't asked how many people had been in the man's childhood household. He couldn't rule out noratinine entirely. But it wasn't a good fit. The fact was that he didn't have enough information to formulate a hypothesis yet. He needed to keep from making any assumptions until he had a great deal more data.

Martok's ulcerated gums were another piece of the puzzle he had to refrain from analyzing too hastily. It might be related to whatever was causing  _taret rol_  in the Cardassians. It might be a different deficiency altogether. It was too soon to tell.

Julian shifted from his side to his back gingerly, aware of his battered flank and the cracked ribs as he turned. The change in position was less painful than he feared, and it gave his back a welcome stretch. He dug his boot heel into the mattress and tractioned his spine briefly, allowing himself the luxury of a low sigh of relief. He tucked his left palm behind his head, feeling the roughness of the scabbed-over scalp lacerations through the oily mat of his hair. Staring up at the grey ceiling with unseeing eyes, he began to compose his interview protocol, spooling out the questions in his mind with the same meticulous clarity with which he would have typed them into his computer terminal back home.

It was an academic puzzle, an intellectual challenge, and a welcome diversion. It kept him occupied and engaged until his neurotransmitters found a new balance and he fell asleep again.

 _(fade_ )

At least until his flank pain improved and the frank hematuria began to resolve, Julian decided he would limit himself to surveying two barracks a day. At that rate, it would take him more than two weeks to survey the whole prison. But if there was one thing he had in abundance, it was time. Tain was now encoding the actual message into the jury-rigged transmitter, but that was a laborious process that he estimated would take at least another week, possibly as long as nine days. In the meantime, Julian had to keep occupied.

He started with his own barracks. It seemed fitting to make General Martok his first subject, and Julian questioned him exhaustively about his symptoms. The sores in his mouth were the most obvious sign of malnutrition. Everything else might be easily attributed to his rigorous encounters in the ring: myalgia, arthralgia, fatigue. Julian had to read between the lines when it came to the fatigue. The warrior could not deny his constant pain, and Julian's own residual hurts seemed to make him feel more able to articulate it, at least once they were alone in the barracks. But he proved reluctant to admit to exhaustion.

"There is too much time for slumber in this place," he growled. "And too little sense of the passage of the hours. Who is to judge whether the sleep any man gets is adequate to his body's needs?"

Julian agreed with this assessment. In the two Dominion weeks since he had arrived here, he still hadn't managed to cobble together anything like a consistent sleep schedule. It was almost impossible: the necessity of waking for a four to six hour period every day and a half was enough to throw off the most well-intentioned sleeper. But he had to try to determine whether the General's weariness ran deeper.

"How do you feel when you first wake up?" he tried. "Before the count, for instance. Or after a nap?"

Martok shot him a black glare, and Julian regretted his choice of noun. Klingons, it seemed, did not take  _naps_. "How do you feel when you wake for the count?" he asked again, meeting Martok's eye with firm resolve. He knew this particular patient would respond to nothing else.

"Unrested," Martok muttered. More vehemently, he said; "But what hope is there of true rest in this place? The lights are too bright at night. Even during orbital day, the barracks is intolerably cold. And there are the dreams…"

He stopped, and for a moment he was taken by naked dismay at this admission. Then his expression hardened into a defiant glare, daring Julian to press him on this.

The right words came to him as if whispered in his ear by Jadzia Dax, too modest to style herself as an expert on Klingon culture but possessed of insights into it that Julian couldn't hope to gain in one lifetime. "I've fought those battles in the night, too, General," Julian said. "The struggle is inglorious, but very real."

Martok stared at him, stricken briefly mute. An almost imperceptible shudder rippled through him. Julian might have missed it entirely despite the sharpness of his eyes, but for the faint tinkle of his chainmail. Then he scowled. "Curse the demons of the heart," he snarled. "I am constantly weary, Doctor. Not only in body, but in spirit."

Julian nodded, very glad that he had banished Tain from the barracks instead of letting him slip inside the wall. He had complained pompously that Julian was obstructing his work, and perhaps that was true. But he never would have got such an honest answer out of Martok if there was any chance of the former head of the Obsidian Order listening in. In any case, the loss of two and a half hours' work between a gruelling but thankfully bloodless count and that day's ration call would not be a significant delay in the broader scope of the plan. There was nowhere else they could go to ensure privacy. All things bent to medical necessity.

"I can certainly understand that," he said gravely. "From everything I've read on the subject, Klingons have difficulty adapting to incarceration. You should be very proud that you've held up as well as you have."

Martok made a rumbling noise of disgust and cast his eye away. "I do not wish to speak of it," he said. "To live like this is not honourable; kept as the plaything of the Jem'Hadar, with no purpose save to endure another day in the hope that a Cardassian proves as clever as he claims. But to yield to an ignoble death would be the greater dishonour."

"You're needed here," said Julian. He did not let too much empathy or gentle sincerity filter into his tone. Instead, he spoke as if reciting hard facts, the necessary assessment of a mission offered to a superior officer in a briefing. "You've been instrumental to Tain's efforts. You've protected the rest of us. I'll need you as my escort while I'm surveying the other barracks. And when we escape, you'll have an even greater purpose. When we get out of here, you and I are going to have to find a way to end the hostilities between the Empire and the Federation. The war was started by the Founders to weaken their two greatest adversaries in the Alpha Quadrant. It can't be allowed to continue."

The General was looking at him again, glaring in outrage at these words — fury directed not at the speaker, but at the Changeling infiltrator who had wrought such chaos in Martok's name. "That foul  _p'taq_!" he snarled. "Had it not been slain, I would see it died a thousand deaths." Then he deflated a little and seemed very weary. "Since you brought me the truth, Doctor, I have been able to think of little else in the long, empty hours. What it did within the Empire fills my heart with wrath. But it is the other that troubles me more."

Julian's mouth grew dry. He knew what Martok was saying, and he couldn't bear the thoughts it stirred in his own mind. Thoughts of the Changeling on Deep Space Nine, not only performing his duties as a member of the senior staff, but living his life. Dining with Garak in the Replimat, trading quips and verbal barbs in a lively cross-cultural debate. Playing in the holosuite with Miles, surely slipping into the roles Julian loved to play as easily as it had slipped into the role of Julian himself. Lounging at the corner desk in the science lab, chatting pleasantly with Jadzia while she worked on some delicate experiment. Exchanging comfortable pleasantries with Leeta as she thought they were settling into an affable post-romantic friendship. Teasing (and being teased by) Quark. Gently cajoling Nerys into taking her makara herbs or soaking her swollen feet, while she rolled her eyes and poked fun at his bedside manner. Confiding in Captain Sisko about some personnel problem, and receiving sound and wise advice in return.

He imagined the Changeling infiltrating the relationships Julian had so carefully built up over the years. He treasured them so dearly not only for their warmth and beauty and the sense of safety they afforded him, but because they were the first real, sustained friendships he had ever been able to form. The idea of the impostor manipulating and undercutting them for some nefarious end was sickening.

"I think about the Changeling," Martok was saying, shaking his head grimly; "walking the halls of my wife's ancestral home. I wonder how it spoke to my children, what ill advice it gave to my retainers, how it misled Gowron and others who turn to me for counsel. Most of all, I wonder how it conducted itself in the company of my wife. It must have been a convincing replacement, if it went so long undetected. Sirella is not a woman easily duped."

"Sirella is your wife?" Julian asked. Of course he had known General Martok must be married: his son and heir had been among the Klingons who had overrun Deep Space Nine in the days just before the collapse of the Khitomer Accords, and his culture had strict rules concerning marriage, succession and the procreative act. Jadzia was playing fast and loose with those traditions in her relationship with Commander Worf, but it was hard to imagine the head of a Great House at liberty to do the same.

Martok nodded, a low, rumbling hiss of appreciation passing his bared teeth. "She is magnificent, Doctor! A woman of strength and willfulness unmatched. A worthy heiress of an ancient House, dauntless in personal combat, gifted in political prowess, the bearer of my sons, the model of might and wisdom for my daughter, the empress of my hearth — and my heart." His expression of rapturous remembrance darkened into a dour grimace. "If she was deceived, the Changeling's dissimulation must have been flawless."

"It's possible he never met her," he said. "How often are you given shore leave to return home?" Klingons did not bring family aboard their ships. Martok's replacement had maintained his disguise for over a year, though: it didn't seem very probable that someone of his rank would not have had leave in all that time, even with the war.

Martok didn't seem to think it likely, either. He shook his massive head. "I was slated to return home for three days following my hunt," he said. "It was to be a glorious send-off before I assumed command of the Negh'Var. I tell you, Doctor, that on those cold nights in the mountains, I dreamed of consummating my return with Sirella. Doubtless she felt likewise."

Julian did not know what to say. A moment ago he had been repulsed and dismayed by the idea of his own replacement even speaking with his friends. But to imagine, as the General was, a Changeling sleeping with his wife — without her knowledge or consent — was horrifying. Would a Founder truly go so far to maintain his cover?

He knew the answer, of course. That was what was so unbearable.

"Do you know anything of my family, Doctor?" Martok asked. "Do you know who now leads the House of Martok, if I am believed dead? The position belongs by right of blood and birth to Drex, but I fear he is too green, to easily swayed by the passions of youth, to make a competent leader. Sirella will hold him to an honourable course if he has been allowed to succeed me, but with the machinations within the High Council, that is no certain thing. There was a strange case — years ago, it must be now — where the master of a Great House was slain, and all that prevented his enemy from seizing his holdings was the wit of his widow and the interference of a Ferengi! If you know anything of my House's fortunes, Doctor, do not spare me the truth."

"I'm sorry," Julian said, shaking his head wearily. One small part of his brain wanted to derail the conversation so they could talk about Quark's brief tenure as the master of a Klingon House, but the rest of him was too burdened by the bent of the larger conversation. He let it pass. "I don't know. With the war…"

Martok nodded and ground out disgusted and discontented words; " _With the_   _war_ , you have greater concerns about my people than who succeeded to the leadership of a disgraced House."

"I haven't heard that your House is in disgrace," said Julian hurriedly, knowing what this assumption might mean for the General's wellbeing. If he believed he would return from this hell to find his family in ruins, it might rob him of the will to escape. Or, Julian reflected after a moment's consideration, it might be an incentive to defy the Dominion more fiercely, in the hopes of restoring honour to his lineage. He knew neither Klingon culture nor this noble-hearted man well enough to guess which.

"It was a House led by a Changeling for months!" growled Martok. "I failed to safeguard my family, my command, and my good name. I can think of no greater dishonour."

"We can't think like that," Julian said. He realized too late that he hadn't said  _you_ , but now that the slip was made, he decided he might as well say what was on his mind. "We can't hold ourselves responsible for our abductions. We certainly aren't to blame for what the infiltrators have done in our names."

Martok's eye narrowed and he studied Julian's face before looking him over from head to toe. "I suppose you are the one person who understands what it is to be replaced," he muttered darkly. "It is a hateful thing, is it not, Doctor?"

"Hateful," Julian agreed fervently. He didn't think he had the courage to enumerate the other things it was. Terrifying. Repugnant. In a strange way, humiliating. It was a fundamental violation of the sanctity of their identities.

Martok shook his head slowly, as if it weighed twice as much as usual. "Are you finished, Doctor?" he asked, shifting towards the edge of the bench and planting both boots on the floor. "I feel the need to patrol the perimeter."

Despite the dark flavour of their conversation, Julian felt a little smile tug at his lips. The General wanted to go for a walk. "That's all for now," he said. "Unless you can tell me anything about malnutrition in Klingons? Do your symptoms put you in mind of any particular deficiency?"

Martok made a rumbling sound of denial. "Such things are of no interest to a soldier," he said. "The Empire does not possess the vast wealth of your Federation, but our people rarely know hunger. Whatever it is that's missing, Doctor, I fear I will be little help in finding it."

"You've already helped," Julian assured him. "Thank you for cooperating."

The warrior hefted himself to his feet, waving off these words to show that Julian had no reason to feel beholden to him for his contribution. "Do you wish me to send in one of the others?" he asked as he moved to the door and smacked the panel.

"Please," Julian agreed. A moment later, he was alone.

He reached beneath his cot for a canteen, and took three slow, judicious sips of water. Two litres a day was not enough to satisfy the needs of his body, and it certainly wasn't adequate to support his traumatized kidney, but he was doing his best. Gingerly, he palpated his flank and felt the deep, pulpy pain to the left of his spine.  _Bed rest_ , his Doctor's Voice warned. The part of him that was an eager scientist and an enthusiastic researcher countered; _But the puzzle!_ It was the ethicist within him who decided that the greater needs of the prison population outweighed his need to lie down, at least for the next hour or two. Once he had more data, he could lie down and mull it over, and then bed rest wouldn't be a waste of time.

The door to the barracks shrieked open, making him jump. Parvok crossed the threshold uncertainly, and Julian found within him one of his very best warm, welcoming physician's smiles.

"Please sit," he said, gesturing at the table. "This won't take long."

The Sub-Lieutenant obeyed hurriedly, but he gripped the edge of the bench as he perched upon it. He was obviously anxious. "What are you looking for?" he asked. "What do you think is missing from the rations?"

"I don't have enough information to guess at this point," Julian said. He stood up slowly and moved to stand by his patient. "Can you tilt your head back for me? I need to feel your glands."

Parvok obeyed. As Julian pressed two knowing fingers to each side of his jaw, palpating salivary glands, then moving down to the lymph nodes, then finally the thyroid, the Romulan's vocal chords vibrated against them. "I knew there had to be something missing," he said grimly. "It just… it tastes so vile. They made no effort to make it edible: why would they make it healthy?"

There was a certain logic to that. "Whatever is missing," Julian said, trying to sound reassuring; "it's either something that isn't required in very large quantities, or it's something that can be stored in the body, so that reserves are just beginning to run low. The Cardassians have been in the camp for almost two years, and they've only just started to show symptoms the last few months. It's possible that you're not deficient in anything at all: you're the first Romulan I've examined. Can you open your mouth, please?"

Parvok obeyed, and Julian was briefly carried back to his very first patient care lab in his first year of medical school. His patient-reenactor had been a Vulcan lieutenant, a volunteer who had beamed down from the spacedock for an afternoon of being prodded and questioned by nervous medical students. Julian, who had spent years building in his mind the image of the kind of doctor he wanted to be, had entered the cubicle with confidence and greeted his patient warmly. "I'm Cadet Bashir, and I'm a medical student. I'll be taking care of you today." He had taken a brief history, noting down all of the vital information and the patient's primary complaint — a sore throat. He had done exactly what he had just now with Parvok: felt the glands for any of the abnormalities they'd been taught to recognize while working with holograms. And then he'd asked the Vulcan to open her mouth, and he'd lost his professional composure.

It had simply been too fascinating: the tongue and gums and buccal tissue that in a human (in most species with iron-bearing hemoglobin, in fact) was a rich, ruddy pink, were greyish-green in Vulcans. Julian should have known to expect that, of course, but somehow he'd never put the pieces together. Twenty-two and tactless in his enthusiasm, he had exclaimed; "Your gums! They're  _green_!" And he'd been treated to the cool arcing of one oblique eyebrow as the patient said, dryly, "What other colour should they be, Cadet?"

Julian had been mortified, and it had cost him on the patient sensitivity portion of his evaluation — the first and last time he'd ever achieved a less-than-exemplary score on that metric. But the memory lingered for another reason, too. It had been in that moment that his dream of practicing medicine had first felt truly real to him, something he was in the process of achieving instead of just a longterm goal informing his choice of course load and specialization stream. The instant of wonder and personal discovery when he had looked at the body of another person and seen something wholly unexpected and extraordinary was unforgettable. That it wasn't  _really_  extraordinary and shouldn't have been in the least bit unexpected did not detract from the magic of the feeling.

"Can you pull down your lower lip for me?" Julian asked, demonstrating with his own mouth. Parvok obeyed, and Julian studied the lead edge of his gums. He was suffering from chronic gingivitis, and there was considerable scaling on his teeth — not surprising at all after almost two years deprived of even the most rudimentary dental hygiene. There were no ulcers, however, and if the flesh looked a little greyer than Julian expected, it was possible that was a trick of the inadequate lighting.

"Do you have any sores elsewhere in your mouth?" he asked. "Or have you had any recently that've healed?"

"No," Parvok said. He returned his head to its customary position, no longer looking up at the ceiling. "That's a good thing, isn't it? Sores in the mouth… they're a sign of malnutrition."

"Certain forms of malnutrition, certainly," Julian said thoughtfully. Seeing the uneasy shift in Parvok's eyes, he softened his expression and said, reassuringly; "The absence of mouth sores is a good thing. May I see your left hand, please?"

Parvok presented it, and Julian took it with both of his own, supporting the palm steadily between them and examining the nail beds with care. The Romulan adjusted his seat uncomfortably.

"I'm not a coward," he said abruptly, cutting through the quiet of the empty barracks.

Julian looked up at him in mild surprise. "I didn't…" he began, then caught himself. Protesting indignantly that he hadn't said any such thing would imply he had thought it. And though it had been nothing more than an idle reflection now and then over the last couple of weeks, it wasn't really fair and he was ashamed of himself for even entertaining the notion. "Of course you're not a coward," he said instead, falling back on the precepts of patient care, where no opinion and precious few objective truths were more important that whatever the patient needed to hear to put their mind at ease.

"I know people think it," said Parvok. "The General looks at me, and he sees everything about Romulans that Klingons find so contemptible. Our pragmatism, our sense of self-preservation, our willingness to tell a convincing lie rather than to die for an inconvenient truth — those aren't virtues to a Klingon. He only sees me cowering behind Major Kalenna, keeping my back to the wall. He doesn't see that recklessness for recklessness's sake will accomplish nothing."

"Right hand, please," said Julian, having turned the left over to study the pale palm. As he started with the second set of fingernails, he said; "The cultural differences between Klingons and Romulans are enormous. It's to be expected that you and General Martok will struggle to bridge them."

"He and the Major don't struggle," said Parvok. "They're like a pair of Reman pit-ponies, pulling together like they've been trained for it since they were foals."

This was such an unexpected image to apply to the fearsome warrior and the indomitable spy that Julian chuckled. "That's one way to put it," he said. "But another thing to bear in mind is that they're both experienced command-level officers. They may come from different worlds and ascribe to different philosophies, but many of the skills they've honed over their years of service are the same. Working together towards a common tactical goal is second nature to them."

Parvok scowled and yanked his hand out of Julian's grasp. He flexed the fingers and wiped it on the leg of his trousers as if wiping away a scrim of slime. "I have served in the military twice as long as Major Kalenna of the Tal Shiar," he muttered. "If she possesses such skills, where are mine?"

Julian didn't have an answer for this. He had suspected from their appearance that Parvok was some years Kalenna's senior, and now it looked as though the gap might be a matter of decades instead. "We all have our own gifts and strengths," he said. "May I please see your hand again? I'm not finished examining it."

Parvok surrendered the limb with a scowl. "That's a Federation attitude if ever I heard one," he said. "'Do what you love, and society will flourish', isn't that it? Everyone just follows their hearts, and somehow there's never a shortage of people to work in the mines or to wade through hip-deep sewage to fix a pipe flow regulator in the waste extraction system."

"Well, yes," Julian said, realizing with mild surprise that he was in fact quite sure of this. He thought of Miles O'Brien's stories of Rom's first months as a member of the maintenance crew. He had been assigned to entry-level tasks while the Chief got a sense of his abilities and his reliability on a team. One of those tasks had indeed been hands-on maintenance inside the holding reservoirs of the station's waste extraction and reclamation system. Far from complaining about the unpleasant assignment, Rom had taken great pride in his work, seeing it not only as an opportunity to prove his capabilities, but as an important contribution to the health and happiness of everyone on board. He was a good man, and it was remarkable how quickly he had embraced a philosophy so different from that of his homeworld. No wonder Leeta fancied him.

"It's not a sustainable system," Parvok argued scornfully. "If everyone can do whatever they want, society collapses. Some people have the privilege of following their passions and thriving. Others just have to be dutiful citizens and fulfill the roles decreed for them."

Something about the bitterness in those words gave Julian pause. "Is that what you are?" he asked softly, studying Parvok's fifth cuticle. There were no ridges on the nails, no calcification in the beds, no discolouration or impairment of capillary refill. "A dutiful citizen?"

"A dutiful citizen, a dutiful son," Parvok spat, casting his eyes away to glare into one seepage-stained corner. "For ten generations, my family has given a son to the military. It's supposed to be the eldest: what greater sacrifice can any family make for the glory of the Republic? But my brother was an athlete, very gifted at the game of  _hanrot_. He wanted to play professionally. So he went off to Rateg to pursue his dream, and I, the second son who should have been free to choose my own path, was sent to the Imperial War College in his place."

Julian had a vague sense of the game of  _hanrot_  bearing some resemblance to the Earth game of football, but honestly he had never followed either. He knew a thing or two about the dream of pursing the life of a professional athlete, however. In his case, it hadn't been the weight of tradition that had stripped the aspiration from him, or even parental pressure (though his father had tried). In the end, he had come up against something far more immutable: the truth.

"And did your brother make a success of the sport?" he asked.

Parvok snorted. "He did. By the end of his second year in the league, he was the most widely celebrated player on the continent. In his fourth season, he took an awkward fall in the middle of a scrimmage and destroyed his left knee. The surgeons made sure he could walk again, but his career was at an end. By then it was too late: I was in my third year of training, and the military would not have been placated by a damaged body. Now he sells shoes and cufflinks in the shadow of the amphitheatre where he once was a god, and I am here. A perennial sub-lieutenant after almost forty years in the service, and now a prisoner of the Jem'Hadar. Not much to show for a family's great legacy, is it, Doctor?"

Julian didn't reply right away. He knew he was studying Parvok's palm far more carefully than necessary, as if by tracing every line and shadow he could spy something of use. It was a story not so much of failure as of perfect mediocrity, but it struck a little too close to home for Julian's liking. Despite his faith in the Federation system of personal betterment and individual accomplishment furthering the good of all, he knew it didn't always work. There were those in human society who couldn't succeed at what they tried, or who lacked the focus and fortitude to stick to a task — any task at all — long enough to become competent. His father was a perfect example: a living embodiment of pompous inadequacy in a society where he should have been able to find his niche and flourish there.

"Do you know what you would have done?" Julian asked quietly. "If you hadn't been pressured to enrol in the War College?"

He expected a scornful scoff or another embittered reply. Instead, Parvok's shoulders sagged wearily and he hung his head, staring first into his lap and then at his hand when Julian released it.

"I was a sculptor," he murmured, like someone speaking out of a waking dream. "I worked in porcelain. Delicate, improbable creations. Gravity-defying vines and sprigs and blossoms so realistic that when they were glazed in jewel-colours, the bees would alight upon them in search of nectar."

Then he stiffened and squared his shoulders beneath their broad, angular padding, and he glared up at Julian with black defiance. "Not the sort of thing well-loved by the Romulan eye," he spat. "Not even 'true' art, as it is accounted on my world. Frivolous, they called it. Pampered.  _Human_. But others were not so blind. There is a piece I made in my seventeenth year on display in the Museum of Rixx on Betazed. I sent it away to a competition for young artists. My father beat me when he found out, but I won. Out of thousands of entrants from dozens of worlds,  _I_  won."

Julian could not speak. He looked into the blazing eyes of this man, pushed into an unremarkable life as an ordinary soldier without the proficiency or drive to succeed in the military, and he thought he understood Parvok's scathing, senseless criticisms of the Federation. They sprang not from scorn, but from envy. On another world, in another society, he would have been permitted to pursue his art. He might have aspired to greatness instead of… this.

The bolted tritanium walls of the barracks seemed to press in on Julian. To Parvok, they must be absolutely suffocating. At least Julian was here because he had chosen and embraced the life of a Starfleet officer, proudly and with conviction. He had weighed the risks that came with service against the rich rewards that came from fulfilling his potential, pursuing his dreams, chasing adventure to the stars. He had not asked to be taken prisoner by a cruel and soulless foe — none of them had. But at least he had stumbled into this bitter pit while running fleetly down the path of passion and fulfilment, not plodding tiredly beneath the yoke of irrevocable obligation to an authoritarian State.

"You see?" sneered Parvok, turning from Julian in disgust. "I am purposeless. Pitiable. Inept. But I am not a coward."

"No," Julian said. "You're not." He wasn't any of those things, but Julian couldn't find the words to express that in a way that would not transgress cultural boundaries.

"I do not wish to die here, human," Parvok said. He clenched his hand into a fist, and stared at it. "I am not interested in martyring myself for a principle, or in angering the Vorta for the pleasure of defiance. Thirty-nine years I have served the Republic. Eleven more, and I can take an honourable discharge and claim my subsistence stipend as a loyal veteran. I can retire to a neutral world and take up my clay again, for the first time in decades. My skill will not be what it was, nor ever become what it could have been, but my hands and heart will remember. All of you have your reasons to yearn for escape. So have I. They are not as lofty as yours, perhaps, or the Klingon's, or the Major's. But surely mine is as substantial as Tain's."

"Tain's?" Julian said, puzzled. He would have thought Tain's motivations were obvious: he wanted to return to Cardassia and resume his mantle of power and terror. He had come to the Gamma Quadrant in the first place in a bold bid to reassert control over the Obsidian Order and the Cardassian Union by destroying the Founders' homeworld. What else would he want upon escape? Or wasn't that as "lofty" in Parvok's eyes as Martok's desire to champion the Empire, or Julian's need to uncover his replacement?

"He wants to return so he can see one man again before he dies," said Parvok. "I want to return so I can serve out my years and come back to my art. Which of us is the more frivolous?"

"One man…" Julian murmured. Garak? Tain wanted to escape so that he could see Garak again? He had assumed the aging Cardassian's interest in his one-time right hand had been informed exclusively by Garak's capacity to rescue them: that Julian's friend was a means for Tain, not an end. "Why do you say that? That Tain wants to see one man again?"

"The one he's composing the code for," said Parvok, as if that were not already clear enough. "I don't know why he wants to see him, but he does. He told me once, one cold night while the others slept. It was weeks ago, long before you came here. It was the first time I saw him in pain, and I think that loosened his tongue. He went from clutching his chest and wheezing to grinning like a man who has drunk too much _kali-fal_ , and he spoke of unfinished business."

 _Unfinished business_. Those words struck an ominous chord in Julian's chest. Tain's thirst for retribution was legendary, and Julian had witnessed it himself. He would never forget the grandfatherly cadence in Enabran Tain's voice as he had stood in his lavishly furnished study and pronounced sentence on the man who had served him so faithfully.  _He doesn't deserve a quick death. On the contrary, I want him to live a long, miserable life. I want him to grow old on that station, surrounded by people who hate him, knowing that he'll never come home again._

If Tain had decided he was no longer satisfied with that vengeance, Julian dreaded to imagine what the next phase might be.

"Did he say anything else?" Julian asked, forcing himself to form the words with care.

Parvok shook his head. "Only that without medical care, he believes he will die. I suppose that's why he's so anxious for you to amass a debt to him: he needs you. It's another reason to want to get out of here as quickly as possible, too."

"Yes…" Julian murmured, not really processing any of this. He was unsettled and uncertain, and the only thing he could think to do to ease his mind was to return rigidly to the examination protocol he had devised the night before. "I need to look at the lining of your lower eyelids," he said, moving his hand into position but refraining from actual contact. "I'm going to use my thumb to retract them, the left one first. All right?"

"Very well," said Parvok. "Get it over with."

Gratefully, Julian resumed the exam.

_(fade)_


	43. Darker Truths

_Note: For those who need to protect themselves from traumatic triggers, the first part of this chapter warrants a warning for non-explicit discussion of sexual assault. While it is not my wish to dwell on this subject, I believe an absence of such adversity in this situation would be unrealistic. The other plot-relevant information disseminated in this section is recapped in the first paragraph after the "(fade)". For those who do not require such warnings, I hope you will understand the need to post what is in effect a "spoiler" in order to avoid harm to others. Thank you all._

**Part VIII, Act II: Darker Truths**

The lining of Parvok's eye socket also seemed a little pale, though Julian could not commit to that without a more reliable source of light. He had few other symptoms. He was suffering from constipation, which, considering the meagre fare they were fed and the general inadequacy of the water ration, was not at all surprising. He admitted more readily than Martok to perpetual exhaustion, but like the General he knew nothing about the consequences of malnutrition in his species. Julian had asked that question for form's sake in this case, ensuring methodological consistency across the species in his patient pool, and because he wasn't arrogant enough to assume he knew more about a people's nutritional needs than the members of that species. He did, however, know a great deal more about Vulcan physiology than he did Cardassian or even Klingon, and the similarities between Vulcans and Romulans were far more innumerable than their handful of differences. Julian was determined to keep an open mind, like a responsible exobiologist, but he didn't anticipate any surprises.

Major Kalenna came in after Parvok, and Julian went through the initial physical exam quickly. She was cooperative, calm, and not in an especially talkative mood. The findings were unremarkable except in the eyes: beneath the transparent gloss of her palpebral conjunctiva, the flesh was undeniably too pale. What had been a suspicion with Parvok was confirmed in his superior officer.

"You're anemic," Julian said, moving his hand away from her face and stepping back to sit on the edge of his cot. It creaked discontentedly beneath him, and he pressed his palms together as he leaned against his forearms. "You're not getting enough dietary copper."

If he had paused a moment to speculate, instead of rigidly avoiding any assumptions, he might have hypothesized this must be the case. Copper was essential to the propagation of hemoglobin in the blood of Romulans and Vulcans, but for most other humanoid species, it was not only extraneous but, with longterm exposure, frankly toxic even in relatively small doses.

Kalenna sighed softly, though she maintained her cool, professional demeanour. "I suspected as much," she said. "I have for some time. There are… other signs."

Julian nodded. There was one question he anticipated needing only for Kalenna. "Has your menstrual cycle stopped?" he asked.

"After less than six months in this place," she agreed. "I endured two cleansing periods, and the third never came."

Romulans and Vulcans had a three-month fertility cycle, slower than that of humans but still rapid enough to ensure efficient propagation of the species.

"At first I feared…" Kalenna murmured, and her gaze slid away. A reflexive shudder shook her slender shoulders, and she set her face in hard lines. "I did not know if such things were possible. I still do not. But next I believed it was because the food provided too little energy to sustain a pregnancy. It is a well-known fact that our fertility is linked to the ability of a mother to nourish her offspring, both before and after birth."

"That's true of many species," agreed Julian. A significant loss of body fat could stall a menstrual cycle, too, but though Kalenna was rail-thin now, she probably hadn't lost enough weight in her first six months to bring about such a change. An absence of dietary copper, on the other hand, explained it perfectly.

There was something else she had said, though, that troubled him. It was not part of the protocol for the nutritional study, but as a responsible physician he felt he could not simply let it pass. Taking his cue from her vague words, he couched his own carefully.

"Was it one of the Cardassians?" he asked gently.

Her eyes snapped to his face, blazing in brief defiance. Seeing the sincere care in his expression, she softened a little, and the defiant tension ebbed from her shoulders. "Who else?" she asked. "No Romulan would assault a major in the Tal Shiar, not even in this place. But  _Cardassians_ —" She spat the word venomously. "—seem to think they have a right to take what they please."

There was a weight of empathy and outrage in Julian's chest. Wasn't the Dominion brutal and heartless enough? Did the prisoners really need to prey upon each other? His right knee throbbed tiredly, offering its opinion on the matter. Apparently they did. "It certainly seems to be a prevailing attitude in the Cardassian military," he said quietly. "Particularly towards women of other species. During the occupation, such atrocities were endemic on Bajor."

She made a disdainful sound and looked coldly away. "I fought off a dozen such advances," she declared proudly. "I am no easy victim." Then she sagged, looking down into her lap at slender hands which trembled briefly before she could command them to be still. "But they set upon me while I was weakened from my bout in the ring. I could not fight them off. Even so, it took three of them to subdue me.  _Animals_ ," she spat. She looked defiantly at Julian. "Two of them are dead now. The third… he did no more than hold my arms. I believe he feared the others too much to refuse."

Julian's lips parted in hollow astonishment. "Did you…" he began, before realizing how profoundly unwise such a question was.

Kalenna snorted quietly and gave a grim little shake of the head. "Not I," she said. "Tain. I do not know how he accomplished it, but no Cardassian has approached me since — not even to ask the hour. I was under his protection after that. When a place opened up in this barracks, he saw I was reassigned. How he did that, too, remains a mystery: the Jem'Hadar do not fear him, and they are impervious to bribes."

Julian did not know which piece of information was more astounding: that Tain had assassinated two of his own people for raping a Romulan woman, that he had spared the life of the one who seemed to be a terrfied accomplice, or that he had managed to assassinate anyone at all in this place bereft of weapons or tools. No wonder the other Cardassians still feared him.

"So you see, Doctor," Kalenna sighed; "your debt to the spymaster pales in comparison to mine. I may not suffer his insults silently, but I will do whatever he asks of me. He knows that well. It is a weakness to which I would sooner not admit, and which I wish I did not possess, but there is no avoiding it."

"Repaying your obligations isn't a weakness. It's a strength," said Julian. "Tain hasn't asked you to do anything that violates your moral code or undercuts your personal integrity, has he?"

He regretted that question, too, as soon as it was out. If Tain had done such a thing, asking Kalenna about it would do far more harm than good.

But she shook her head. "Not yet," she said. "Almost everything he has asked of me has been in service of our escape, and there are few things indeed I would hesitate to do if they furthered that end. But the point is that he  _could_  ask such a thing, Doctor, and I would have to obey him. As will you, if your turn ever comes."

Julian didn't believe this. The favours he owed Enabran Tain were considerable, but they did not amount to a life debt. He was willing to repay them commensurately, but he was not about to compromise his ethical backbone simply because Tain had helped him keep his shoes, or kept him from a beating during his first ration call. But it would be cruel to argue with Kalenna on this.

"Then we'll have to hope it never comes to that," he said instead. He waited to see if she had more to add, and then finally offered; "Would you like to continue with the examination now?"

"Yes!" Kalenna breathed, drawing herself up with a huff of air. She nodded at him gratefully. "I think that would be best."

( _fade_ )

When the Major left him to fetch Enabran Tain, Julian leaned back against the wall with a tired little sigh. He'd found one nutritional deficiency, then: there was either no copper at all in their diet, or a level low enough to avoid toxicity in the other species who ate the slop — and woefully inadequate for the hematological needs of the Romulan population. Kalenna's anemia was more pronounced than Parvok's, but he was almost guaranteed to find that all the other Romulans in the camp suffered the same problem to one degree or another.

It was an answer, all right, but it wasn't the complete answer. Neither Klingons nor Cardassians had any need for copper at all. Whatever they lacked, it had to be something else.

Julian's flank was pulsing dully, and his pelvis felt tender and bloated. He would have to go down to the end of the pod soon, and endure the ordeal that urination had become. That the pain seemed to be spreading instead of retreating worried him. Discomfort in his bladder could simply be due to the prolonged hematuria: blood was an irritant to mucous membranes, especially those that weren't routinely exposed to it. Add to that the fact that his inadequate daily ration of water meant his urine was too highly concentrated, and that the damage to his kidney had almost certainly precipitated a pH imbalance in the waste, and that might be all the explanation he needed. But there were grimmer possibilities, too. The spectre of infection was the one that unsettled him most. The sheer barbarism of a situation where he had no access to antibiotics was terrifying: every open wound might prove deadly, and an injury like this…

It didn't bear thinking about right now. He had to focus on the task at hand, and to maintain his professional demeanour for what was sure to be one of the most challenging interviews in his survey. He still hadn't exactly gotten Enabran Tain's consent as a participant, and he didn't doubt he was about to be put through his paces to earn it. The visit to the toilets could wait until he was finished here.

Julian pushed himself up off the wall, his palm bracing the small of his back against the flare of pain in around his kidney. It brought with it a slow swell of nausea that was almost welcome, because it distracted from the hunger pangs. All this talk about nutrition and the miserable mush they were served once every thirty-four hours was making him all too aware of his constant, grinding ravenousness. Julian wasn't sure he even remembered what it felt like to have a full stomach, much less what it was to be able to satiate himself whenever he felt the need. In theory, a sustained caloric reduction was supposed to lead to a blunted ghrelin response after only three or four days. He was going on the Earth equivalent of twenty days, now, and Julian hadn't noticed any appreciable reduction in his appetite. Quite the contrary.

He was just settling into the upright position, curled forward to brace his right forearm across his thigh, when the door clattered open and Tain came in. He looked Julian over appraisingly, and flung his jacket down on the near bench. He was stripping off his tunic even before the Doctor could greet him.

"I assume you want to listen to my heart," he said as he emerged from the garment and fumbled for the tails of his innermost shirt. "You don't really intend to waste my time with this absurd game of yours, do you?"

"It isn't a game," Julian said calmly, refusing to rise to the man's obvious scorn. "It's a comprehensive survey of the symptoms of malnutrition in the prison population. I need to find out what's missing from our diet."

"And then what?" asked the Cardassian, snorting in amusement. "You think you'll take your findings to the Vorta, and he'll just throw up his hands and say; 'Silly me! What an oversight! I'll rectify that immediately!'?"

Julian had no answer for this. He hadn't thought that far ahead, and he did not want to now. The crawling suspicion of futility was sickening, and he quashed it violently. He could worry about what to do with his results when he had them! In the meantime, he needed occupation and answers, and the other prisoners needed medical attention, however primitive.

"You'd be wise to cooperate with me, Tain," he said as the Cardassian, now naked to the waist, sat down on the table and settled himself as comfortably as possible. The folds of skin over his ribs seemed looser than ever today, and Julian was willing to bet his belt was cinched tighter now than it had been in decades. "You've got symptoms yourself. This flaking on your scales—" He got to his feet and indicated the affected patches. "—has been identified to me as characteristic of the condition called  _taret rol."_

Tain scoffed so energetically that his whole body heaved. "That's preposterous!" he blustered, scornful and amused all at once. "I'm a man of substance, Doctor.  _Taret rol_  is a disease of beggars and slave labourers! Only the pitiable contract it."

Julian could not help but feel a little sympathy for Tain's position. That attitude, as unfeeling as it was to those less fortunate, meant that he found the diagnosis humiliating as well as worrisome.

"Beggars and slave labourers," he echoed quietly. "And prisoners?"

"Well, yes," Tain allowed. "In the convict labour camps, it's widespread, but—" He paused and scowled blackly up at Julian, twisting to do so because the physician had moved around to examine the disintegrating skin on his back. "It's preposterous," he repeated.

"Prisoners who are fed once every day and a half," Julian went on; "and served half a kilogram of starchy slop that does not provide all the required nutrients for one species, at least, and can hardly be expected to cover all the needs of the others."

Tain's eyes narrowed to slits in his puffy face. He jerked away from Julian's touch, where his fingers were brushing the coarse flakes over his spinal scales. Contemptuously, he said; "What do you know of  _terot rol_?"

"Very little," Julian admitted. He moved to check Tain's temporal pulse, reasoning that perhaps the cardiac exam would acclimatize the man to his ministrations and make him less resistant when the time came to look for other clues to malnutrition. "The older Cardassian in the other barracks identified it to me. He was familiar with the signs because he grew up during the famine in Culat."

Tain sniffed disdainfully. "Every beggar's brat who survived the famines thinks himself a hero out of legend," he said. "Gul Madred was always particularly insufferable on the subject. As if their fathers' failure to provide for their offspring was a matter of pride instead of deepest disgrace!"

Julian stared at him. He knew he should not be astonished by this man's utter lack of compassion, but somehow he still was. "What a charming person you are," he said sarcastically.

Tain smirked. "I know," he replied with relish.

Julian shook his head fractionally and braced his palm on the table so that he could put an ear to Tain's chest, listening for his left lung. "Take a deep breath. Hold it. Release slowly," he instructed. There was still crackling deep in the alveoli, appreciable but not overtly alarming. He wanted to hear what it sounded like during normal speech, and he wasn't quite done trying to drive home his point to Tain. "And I suppose  _you_  were never affected by the famines?" he asked.

The Cardassian made a noise of disgust. "I was not a helpless child, or a worthless gutter brat," he said. "I was a young operative in the Obsidian Order, already known for my skill, my power increasing with every year. There was never a lack of food on  _my_  plate. And though those in my household may have gone to sleep with empty bellies now and then, no one beneath my roof starved!"

There was a note of proprietary pride beneath the contempt in his voice. Julian heard it, and understood that Tain was well aware of what an accomplishment this was, and that it had been hard-won. He had provided for himself and for  _those in his household_ , whatever that meant — servants, presumably? Julian could not imagine this man having a wife or a family — at a time when others were dying of starvation in the streets. It was something to be proud of, and even if he could not countenance the man's absolute lack of empathy towards those who had been unable to muster such resources, Julian had to acknowledge that it could not have been an easy thing to achieve.

"I see," he said, moving to the other lung and repeating his instructions on that side. There was considerably more fluid in this organ, but it was still a marked improvement over his last examination. "Can you tell me anything useful about  _taret rol_? Do you know what causes it?"

"Slow starvation causes it, Doctor," said Tain, as if stating the obvious to a particularly slow pupil. "The skin begins to break down, and then ulcers form. I don't know of anyone who's died of that alone, but it's miserable."

The patches of affected skin looked a little like the plaques that formed on sufferers of pellagra. That reaction was precipitated by photosensitivity, however, which certainly was not the problem in the artificially lit gloom of a barren asteroid. Still, responses varied between species and Julian took note of niacin as a possible culprit. It was definitely a nutrient found more readily in meat than in cereal sources: humans had been fortifying grain products with niacin since the twentieth century. Again, Julian found himself wishing for his Cardassian database back on the station. What was the niacin content of rulot gruel?

"What about other physiological effects?" asked Julian. "Digestive disturbances? Organ dysfunction? Sores in the mouth? What else happens to sufferers of  _taret rol_?"

"Hair loss," said Tain. "Weakness, of course — it's a plague for labour camp overseers, because the workers become clumsy and useless. I think there are other symptoms, too, but why ask me? I have no interest in these things. I'm surprised  _you_  don't know yourself, Doctor, curious little vole that you are. I'd have thought you'd pry into every particular of Cardassian physiology. Isn't that your way?"

"I never expected to deal with nutritional deficiencies," Julian muttered, a little defensively. He positioned himself to listen to Tain's heart, this time quite able to support his own body in the awkward contortion, without having to manhandle his patient. "Be quiet for a minute, please?"

The rhythm was still unsteady and stilted, the pulse still too slow. The premature ventricular ejection persisted. And Julian was still powerless to do anything about any of it. Very careful not to let the impotent futility of the situation infiltrate his voice or his expression, Julian straightened up. "That's all I need for now, at least as far as your heart's concerned. You can put your clothes back on."

He stepped back to give Tain room to do so, but the Cardassian was studying him instead. "Well, Doctor?" he said at last. "Good news or bad?"

Julian considered his words carefully, but rapidly. Too long a pause was easy for a patient to interpret as a grim prognosis. "There's been some improvement," he said. "Spending the extra time inside the wall is helping. Tomorrow is our last day in orbital night, from what I understand. Once the ambient temperature rises again, we might see further positive results."

"Even when it rises, it is still too cold for my kind, Doctor," Tain said grimly. "You cannot imagine what it is to be a Cardassian in this place."

Julian, who was beginning to think he would never be warm again except in the waning throes of the reduced but still appreciable fever burning through him, knew that was probably true. He had never before given his hypothalamus much thought, but he cherished it here. The biological capacity for internal thermoregulation was a great gift of nature.

"You're right," he said, positioning himself in front of Tain. "Will you allow me to examine you for my study?" he asked, point-blank. "I'm looking for nutritional deficiencies in the prison population, and I'm almost certain you have some of the symptoms. The data I gather from you will be kept confidential, and never associated with your name or identity in any way."

The last assurance was standard in Federation-sanctioned scientific studies. He would offer it to every prisoner he approached, with one exception. It was meaningless to give such a promise to Martok: as the only Klingon in the subject pool, he wouldn't have the same anonymity Julian could give the others. Then again, he couldn't write anything down and it was not as if his results would ever be published, so perhaps it didn't matter. All the same, following the established protocols was comforting. It reassured him that this was a professional undertaking, not just a frantic distraction from the darkness in his heart.

Tain sneered at him, his jovial countenance cracking. "And if I refuse, Doctor? Will you refuse to tend to my heart?"

"Certainly not," Julian said levelly, once again refusing to rise to the bait. "I'll treat you, regardless, and if there's anything beneficial that comes out of the study, I'll share it with you as well as everyone else. Without your data, I'll be slowed down, I'm sure, but it won't stop me."

Tain laughed, a rollicking, boisterous sound that seemed out of place in their bleak surroundings. "I have a feeling precious little stops you, Julian Bashir," he said. He flapped one hand absently. "Go on, then: examine me."

"Thank you," said Julian, again more for form's sake than out of genuine gratitude. He was beginning to think that having Tain in his subject pool would prove more of a nuisance than a help, especially if he had to do follow-up exams. He shifted his feet to widen and steady his stance a little, fighting off a thin tremor of dizziness, and positioned his hands. "Can you tilt your head back for me?" he asked, meticulously wording the instructions exactly as he had for the first three participants. Uniformity reduced variability, and improved the accuracy of scientific results. "I need to feel your glands."

Tain's eyes widened in the Cardassian equivalent of an arched eyebrow. "My  _glands_?" he repeated. "In the neck?"

"That's right," said Julian. "It won't hurt a bit."

The elderly Cardassian chuckled. "Oh, if you think my compatriots are going to let you manhandle their throats, Doctor, you're in for a remarkable experience!" he said. But he tipped back his head, lifting his chin and baring his neck. "Go on, then: hurry up!"

Julian found nothing remarkable. The salivary glands and lymph nodes were firm but palpable. He felt his fourth normal thyroid gland of the morning. At least iodine was off the table. He withdrew his hands, and Tain straightened his head. "Can you open your mouth, please?"

Tain obeyed. His palate and gums were greyish-rose, but his tongue was markedly more pink. "Is your tongue tender or painful at all?" Julian asked. "It looks swollen."

 _We're back to pellagra_ , his physician's mind reflected.  _Or riboflavin deficiency. Most of the B vitamin deficiencies manifest with glossitis. But so does zinc deficiency, at least in some species. Vitamin K deficiency in Ferengi…_  He paused, puzzled. How did he remember  _that_?

Tain curled his lip distastefully. "It stings at times," he admitted. "Is that significant? I thought it was the thirst."

"It might be," Julian said, addressing both the question and the assumption with the same vague remark. "Please stick it out."

Tain did so, rolling his eyes to show how ridiculous he found this situation. Julian inspected his tongue carefully. It was definitely swollen, and far redder than the other mouth tissues. There were streaks of white plaque between the papillae, another result of being deprived of any means to clean the teeth. The sour, fermented odour of Tain's breath sprang from the same enforced neglect. Julian couldn't see any evidence of fungal infection or leukoplakia, which might have explained the inflammation.

"All right," he said finally. "That's all I need to see." He returned to his script. "Can you pull down your lower lip for me?"

The rest of the examination and the interview were unremarkable. Tain had no sores in his mouth and no ridges on his nails. His reported fatigue was almost diagnostically useless, because the heart condition alone could have accounted for any degree of exhaustion. His description of his digestive health was everything Julian had expected — although he seemed more prone to diarrhea than constipation. None of them were getting enough dietary fibre: all of them were bound to have some kind of intestinal irregularity.

Finally, Julian questioned him about his knowledge of malnutrition in Cardassians. It was utterly pointless: either he knew nothing more than he had shared, or he was affecting a very convincing level of disinterest. Julian was frustrated by this indolent attitude, but he wasn't surprised. He wondered how much any of his human colleagues knew about malnutrition in their own species. Did Miles, for example, even know the symptoms of scurvy? Probably not. Why would he? He had no particular interest in the pathophysiology of nutritional disease and, as Garak had once so eloquently put it,  _for generations now, humankind has had more than enough food_.

He was holding out hope that some of the other Cardassians of a certain age would be less oblivious than Tain, or less traumatized and protectively detached than the man in Barracks 15. Although given Tain's remarks, Julian was beginning to wonder how much luck he would have recruiting participants.

 _(fade_ )

Despite his all-consuming hunger, Julian ate his measure of greyish mush slowly that day. Although he knew it was pointless, he couldn't help trying to analyze its contents. If he could taste the thiamine, after all, wasn't it possible he could taste something else? Anything else, really, that might narrow down his field of inquiry. He rolled each fingerful around his mouth, testing it with each area of his tongue, with the sensitive tastebuds on his soft palate, with the lining of his cheek. There was a faint chalkiness, but whether that meant the mixture was fortified with calcium or not, he couldn't say. He didn't taste anything he hadn't before.

He wished he knew more about the primary constituents. He didn't recognize either the particular grain or the lentil-like legumes with their unique spiral stippling. He didn't know their names or even the world they were from. He didn't know what kind of oil provided the greasy undertaste. He didn't know what might be present in the stewing water. He just didn't know. There were no answers on his dingy plate, and eating this slowly only served to rile up and torment his gurgling stomach. Julian sucked down the last few mouthfuls hurriedly, and licked the dish clean.

He couldn't help but look at it wistfully. Even now, with his meal just finished, he wasn't satiated. Though he knew it had to be an illusion, he felt hungrier than when he'd drawn his ration. Julian looked at the others, handing off their plates as Parvok collected them dutifully. He cast a broader net, taking in the crowd of gaunt faces and the hollow yearning in eyes from a dozen different worlds. No one was satisfied. They were all gradually but inexorably wasting away.  _Slow starvation_ , Tain had said.

Slow starvation, indeed.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**palpebral conjuctiva:** the mucous membrane that lines the inside of the eyelids.

 **hematuria:** blood in the urine. May be either gross (visible to the naked eye) or microscopic.

 **ghrelin:** the hormone responsible for hunger cues.

 **glossitis:** inflammation of the tongue.

 **papillae:** the raised bumps on the tongue.

 **leukoplakia:**  a white, raised lesion on a mucous membrane such as those in the mouth, often precancerous.


	44. Practicing Medicine

**Part VIII, Act III: Practicing Medicine**

Julian and Martok were waiting outside Barracks 15 when its residents returned from the ration call. They could have gone in, of course, and waited inside. At least in there, Julian could have sat down and avoided a little more strain on his healing body. But it hadn't seemed like a respectful way to begin. He leaned against the wall instead, only pushing himself up off of it when Amcet and the others drew near. They halted, wary of the Klingon warrior standing with his feet broadly planted. His left hand was hooked around the strap that had served him in place of a sling while his elbow healed. Either it still pained him, or Martok had grown used to the habit. He always managed to make this look like the idle pose of a man with nothing to fear instead of a supportive measure for an injured limb. His neatly bandaged right hand rested at his side, that arm held as if it could fly up at any moment to strike at a threat. Martok had his lips peeled ever so slightly back, revealing the jagged points of his teeth, and his one eye narrowed as the Cardassians approached.

"I've come to examine you," Julian said, speaking to Amcet. "As many of you as are willing to help. I'm investigating the outbreak of  _taret rol_ , and its implications for the prison population."

One of the Cardassians who had slept through his previous visit snorted in disgust and pushed past the others, headed for the waste reclamation room at the rear of the pod. He still had his canteens in the crook of his arm, and the part of Julian that was responsible for the public health of the population of Deep Space Nine was faintly appalled that he would bring them with him into such an unsanitary environment. Then again, he had been fortunate to find himself in a barracks where there seemed to be an unspoken pact against larceny. It was foolish to presume that might be the case in every unit.

"I don't know what you're hoping to find," Amcet said sourly. He looked over his shoulder at his comrades. The others looked hostile and defensive, but the eldest, the one who had identified the lesions in the first place, jerked his head tightly. Amcet sighed and slapped the door panel. "But I owe you my life, human. You may enter."

"Just you," said the aging soldier as he followed Amcet through the door. "Not the Klingon."

"I am here to keep watch, Cardassian," growled Martok. "I will enter if I see fit, or if the Doctor wishes it. For now, this is my post."

The Cardassian clearly wanted to argue with him, but did not dare. Julian waited until the five residents were through the door before falling in behind. All of them were already bundling themselves into their blankets. Amcet wore his like a shawl and stood by his bunk instead of hunkering down on it.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Julian nodded to the table. "Please have a seat," he said. "I've decided to conduct a study to try to find out what's missing from our diet. Cardassians aren't the only people affected. I've identified at least one deficiency in the Romulan prisoners, and I'm quite certain there are other nutrients either absent or provided in amounts too low to sustain long-term health."

"All of this because Darbrel has a rash?" Amcet said sceptically.

"It's not a rash," the older man muttered. He sat heavily on his cot and hugged his blanket to him. Bundled up like that, none of them looked like the fearsome soldiers and spies they had been. They looked like refugees waiting out the endless night, cold, hungry and miserable. "He's starving. Which means we all are. It's only a matter of time before you start showing signs, too."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Julian agreed calmly, stepping around the man sprawled on the right centre bunk and approaching Amcet as the young Cardassian sat down. "I'm hopeful that if I can identify what's missing, I can convince the Vorta to correct it."

He didn't know if he really believed he could do that, but after Enabran Tain's contemptuous mockery of the idea, Julian felt belligerently defensive of it. It hadn't even been his idea in the first place: he'd had no clear sense of what he might do with his results. And yet Tain had put his back up. At the very least, it sounded encouraging.

"The Vorta cannot be convinced of anything," muttered Darbrel, the one with the lesions on his neck.

"He tore a White port from the neck of a Jem'Hadar who was trying to break him in the ring," Amcet argued, one booted foot swinging idly. "He is capable of things the rest of us aren't."

Those words made Julian uneasy. He had exerted so much effort over the course of his adult life to toe the fragile line between worthwhile excellence and suspicious capacity. He didn't like to be thought of as being capable of things other people were not. He squared off in front of his patient, and forced himself to focus on his study protocol.

"Can you tilt your head back for me?" he asked. "I need to feel your glands."

_(fade)_

Julian left Barracks 15 about an hour and a half later, stiff, weary, and satisfied. Only one of the inmates had refused the examination, and even he had been willing to answer Julian's questions. None of them knew any more about nutritional disease than Tain or the other aging Cardassian, whose name was Drevar. But he had observed three more incidents of glossitis, none of them as pronounced as Tain's. Two men suffered intermittent diarrhea, and the other four reported chronic constipation. Drevar had marked neurasthenia in his feet, which might be age-related but could also be symptomatic of some deficiency; Julian had flagged that in his mind to watch for in others. No swollen glands, no granulation of the thyroids, no nystagmus, no ulcers of the gums or buccal tissue.

For the diagnosis of the  _terat rol_ skin lesions, Julian had decided to rely on the patients' own assessments. It seemed needlessly cruel to force the Cardassians to disrobe when the air was so bitterly cold and they were struggling just to stay lucid. If he felt it necessary, he could do another round in a couple of days to examine chests and backs. Three of Amcet's cellmates reported the flaking, cracking patches, Darbrel included. So far, that put the incidence of the condition, whatever it signified, among the Cardassian prisoners at forty-two point nine percent.

"You look pleased with yourself, Doctor," Martok observed as the two of them stepped out into the vaulted atrium. "Tired, but pleased with yourself."

"Hmm?" Julian blinked twice as he took an intellectual step back from his mental tabulation of this first pool of results. An idle little smile touched his lips. "Yes, I suppose that I am."

"It is going well, then," said Martok. It wasn't a question.

"I'm off to a good start," Julian agreed. He glanced back over his shoulders. "Of course, that's the only other barracks where I had a foot in the door. I don't know if I'll be as lucky coming in cold."

He thought uneasily about Barracks 22, home to Trel Lugek's bereaved accomplice. Julian had not even been welcome there while the Cardassian was dying. He would hardly be welcome now.

"Perhaps Major Kalenna could make an introduction to that Sub-Commander of hers," said Martok. "She has some sway with him, and it would be better if you worked with the Romulans instead for the next couple of days. Once they have adapted back to daylight temperatures, the Cardassians will be less dangerous."

Sub-Commander Darok. Julian had forgotten him. He wouldn't need to rely on Kalenna's introduction, either. He had aided the Sub-Commander in his subterfuge when the Jem'Hadar had brought him into the ring. Julian would never presume to use such an obligation to coerce a patient to cooperate with him, but surely it did at least entitle him to a meeting.

"That's an excellent suggestion, General. Thank you," he said. "I…"

His voice trailed off into silence. Martok had stopped moving, and now Julian saw why. Occupied with his data and his plans, he hadn't really been paying attention to his surroundings. He hadn't seen the Jem'Hadar gathered around the lighted ring, nor processed the shuffling sounds of incipient combat. As he edged to the left to get a clear sightline between two armoured backs, Julian flinched at the sound of a ferocious impact and the winded moan of a prisoner.

He started forward instinctively, and a firm hand clamped on his elbow.

"Stay back," Martok hissed through the corner of his mouth. "You have been absent from the spectacle for some days now, so perhaps you have forgotten. But if you interfere, the Jem'Hadar will see you are punished. You have charged me to protect you, Doctor: heed my words!"

Julian stopped straining against the General's hold, and nodded tightly. He knew that his body, and especially his left kidney, could not stand much more punishment. Nor had he forgotten the threat Deyos had made against his patients on the day Lugek had taken the beating that later proved fatal. If Julian was deemed to have tried to save another prisoner from his prescribed punishment, that prisoner would be vaporized.

Another grunt of pain came from the ring, and a moment later the gong sounded. Julian moved silently and surreptitiously to the left, and Martok stepped with him, glaring a warning.

"I just need to watch," Julian whispered.

The warrior did not look pleased, but neither did he argue. The Jem'Hadar weren't paying them any mind: they were intent upon the ring, watching with dispassionate, appraising eyes. Every pair had the same cold, dead look: like so many polished marbles set in craggy faces. They were transfixed, but seemed to feel nothing. Even the eagerness that coursed like a current through their ranks when Martok was in the ring, or the angry impatience with which they had watched Julian's evasion tactics were absent now. They seemed completely desensitized to the spectacle before them.

The combatants rotated positions, the Jem'Hadar soldier moving like a predator. The prisoner was moving like a dazed ewe, swaying unsteadily on legs that didn't want to hold him. His arms hung limp and heavy from his shoulders, and there was a look of dumb suffering in his eyes. He was a Cardassian, as cold-ravaged and exhausted as any of his compatriots. He was in no condition to be out of bed, much less fighting in the ring.

The Jem'Hadar — Julian thought he was the Sixth — swung both fists, hands woven together to form a club, and clouted the prisoner across the side of the head. He flew to the right, legs first stumbling, then crumpling so that his shoulder slammed into the stone floor. He tried to draw up his knees to protect his abdomen, but the Jem'Hadar kicked him savagely just below the edge of his breastplate. Any lower, and he would have struck the pelvic armour, but he had found the vulnerability where the two plates were joined by a flexible pane of oily black leather so that the wearer could sit with ease. The Cardassian rocked in against the impact of the heavy boot, air escaping his throat in a strangled moan. The second vicious kick had him curled almost into a fetal position, which is when the guard moved to kick him in the head instead.

"Enough!" First Ikat'ika proclaimed from his vantage point at the lip of the ring. He held up his hand to emphasize the command. "He is down. Give him an opportunity to rise. If he does not, the match is at an end."

"But he scarcely put up a fight!" the upright combatant argued in disgust. He swung his foot disdainfully at the Cardassian, now trying to roll onto his knees so that he was less vulnerable. He shied away from the threatening movement, but the boot did not make contact. The Order of Things demanded obedience, and Ikat'ika had given his orders. "These Cardassians — they are worthless at this time of the month!"

"It was you who requested a Cardassian opponent," said the First coldly. "What did you expect?"

"I expected a challenge!" the Sixth snapped. He swung an arm to pick out the young Jem'Hadar who now bore deep, black scabs on his neck flap. "Like the one that bit his throat! Perhaps tomorrow, we should return that one to the ring. He, at least, had spirit."

He glared down at the huddled ball of a man at his feet and curled his grey lip in revulsion. "And he was considered a leader among his people! They will prove no challenge at all in combat."

"Not every species," Ikat'ika said slowly, shifting his stern gaze from his subordinate to cross the ring so that it fixed on Julian and Martok; "will provide the same resistance. Some will be easily defeated. Others… will struggle harder."

The menace in his eyes chilled Julian's blood, but he was not about to flee from it. He stepped forward instead, coming to the edge of the ring. Martok followed close on his shoulder, the proud swagger of battle in his gait even though he really was in no condition to take on these soldiers.

"If you're finished," Julian said, the words coming out far more coldly and tersely than was probably wise; "I need to see what I can do to help him."

"He is not worth your time, human," the Sixth spat disdainfully. He took a menacing step forward and raised an almost accusatory finger to point at the band across his chest where the coloured shoulder bar of his uniform met the black fabric below. "You would be wise to prepare for your own next bout in the ring. There are those among us who do not fear to face you."

"Sixth!" snapped Ikat'ika, finally confirming Julian's identification of the combatant. "Return to your duties. The day's combat is finished."

The guard made a noise of hostile discontent, but he obeyed. Julian stepped into the ring as the Jem'Hadar stepped out, and dropped to his uninjured knee at the Cardassian's side.

"Can you hear me?" he asked. "I'm a doctor. I'm here to help you."

The Cardassian was still conscious, his chest heaving as he moved sluggishly, drawing in his limbs so that he was curled up like a tortoise under the shell of his armour. His brow was braced against the floor, and he was shuddering uncontrollably.

"It's all right. I'm going to help you," Julian repeated. He laid a hand on each of the man's broad, lean shoulders, and had to withdraw them immediately when the Cardassian turned like a cornered animal, snarling through bared teeth.

Julian sat back on his heels, holding his palms face-out to show he posed no threat. "I'm a doctor," he repeated.

"The  _Starfleet_  doctor," the Cardassian growled hoarsely. There was a sheen of perspiration on his grey skin, and his mouth twitched and quivered as he spoke.

"The only doctor in the camp," Julian countered. He was aware of Martok, a silent sentinel just inside the ring behind him, and of Ikat'ika, watching the tableau with studied disinterest, his head tipped to one side. "Will you let me help you?"

"There is no help for any of us, human," the man sneered. He planted his palm next to his head and managed to push himself up onto one elbow. The effort seemed to exhaust him, and he subsisted there for a while, sawing in laboured breaths. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and Julian saw the lacrymal fluid beading on his black lashes. It was something that had surprised him to notice about Garak, all those years ago when he'd been approached — accosted? — in the Replimat: Cardassians had eyelashes.

"Well, then, we'll have to help ourselves," Julian said bracingly. He got his arm around the man's back again, taking hold of each shoulder and easing him up until he was sitting on his boot-heels, curled forward over his abdomen with his head hanging. "There. I'm just going to check your pulse."

It was racing, by Cardassian standards, but that was hardly surprising. Julian was far more concerned by the chill of the man's skin and the way that he did not even try to bristle with pride as Julian laid a palm across his ridged brow and then did a quick digital check of his auxiliary vertebrae. There was a hematoma already forming on the left side of his skull, hidden beneath the greasy, unwashed hair. Julian's own scalp itched in sympathy at that inconsequential observation, and he found his eyes drifting to the scales on the man's near neck ridge. He saw the telltale flakes and the fissures in the dermis, and then he forced himself to look away.

This man hadn't yet consented to participate in the study, and Julian shouldn't let his research distract him from the patient in front of him. He glanced up at Ikat'ika, still staring at them like some kind of carven demon, and he leaned nearer to the Cardassian.

"Can you stand?" he asked. "I'll help you. I'd like to get you to shelter if we can. It's colder out here than it is in the barracks, and the guards…"

"Always watching," muttered the Cardassian, clearly comprehending. "I think I can stand."

"Good," Julian breathed, shifting position and preparing to rise. "That's good. Get your arm around my shoulders, and we'll lift together."

He knew such exertion was less than ideal in his current condition, but he was wary of further delay. He didn't like the way the First was eyeing them, and Julian didn't think it would be wise to send General Martok to find someone else to help. There were no ready volunteers in the atrium at the moment: as always, the other prisoners had made themselves scarce during the fight. Julian wasn't about to ask the General's aid, with his ravaged hand. The most expedient option was to do it himself.

"One, two,  _three!_ " he counted, and they both exerted what strength they could. Julian knew at once that he had misjudged. He was stronger than his build and condition should have allowed, but he was worn down with his recent ordeals and weakened with chronic hunger. His limbs had to strain to help the Cardassian to his feet, even though his patient was also exerting every effort his quaking body was capable of offering. Julian had to bend to the left as he hauled, to avoid wrenching his battered flank. Even so, he felt a slimy slither of pain through his abdominal cavity, burning under his floating ribs.

The Cardassian's boot skidded against the dusty floor as he tried to rise, and Julian almost lost his grip. The man would have fallen, but at that moment Martok stepped forward, closing his left hand around the man's far arm and lending his strength despite his healing elbow. They passed the tipping point, and a moment later the three of them were on their feet. Julian, breathless but victorious, rocked into a steadier stance just in time, because the Cardassian flung off the General's hand, thrusting most of his weight onto the human pillar instead.

"Unhand me, Klingon!" he spat.

Martok bared his teeth but said nothing. He was watching Ikat'ika with a silent challenge in his eyes.

"Where are we going," Julian asked, gripping the Cardassian's bony wrist and trying to hitch him a little higher.

The man tried to pull away, but it was taking all of his strength just to keep his feet: he had none left to wrestle free of Julian's practiced hold. This wasn't an ideal one-person assist with the aid of a transfer harness, but it was very much within the realm of techniques he had been trained to use and had employed many times in circumstances more urgent and beleaguered than this.

"I will not be seen leaning on a Starfleet officer," the Cardassian hissed. Then his pain-glazed eyes fixed on the stony countenance of the Jem'Hadar First and he seemed to reevaluate his priorities. "Barracks 27," he muttered.

"Fine," said Julian, guiding him into the first three steps. That carried them to the edge of the ring. "Step up," he instructed.

It took a moment for the man to obey. He was staring down at his feet as if trying to remember how. Martok moved as if to take hold of his arm again, and that seemed to push him into motion. He lifted one leaden boot, planted it, and then with Julian's help, got the other over the lighted rim and out onto the open floor.

It was slow going, but they found a rhythm after only a few metres, and by the time they had left Ikat'ika far behind, the Cardassian was bearing most of his own weight. When they reached the far set of pylons supporting the dome, he slid twisted his wrist out of Julian's grasp and slid his arm down between them. Julian reached across to take his hand instead, thumb-to-thumb in the appropriate supportive configuration.

At the mouth of the barracks pod, the Cardassian halted and shooed Julian away with his right hand. He withdrew half a step, keeping both arms at the ready in case the man started to fall. He wasn't sure he'd have the strength to keep him upright, not without doing more harm to himself in the process, but at least he'd be able to ease him to the floor instead of letting him collapse.

The Cardassian didn't fall. He swayed a little, pressing his hand to his pelvis where the Sixth had kicked him. His eyes were unfocused, blank with pain, but his face was set in haggard lines of resolve. He blinked twice, his nictitating membranes lagging a little behind the upper lids. Garak's had done the same thing while he was suffering the agonies of withdrawal from his failing neural implant. It couldn't be a good sign.

"Leave me," he said with an air of cold command. "Your services are not required."

"You're mistaken," said Julian, not so easily dissuaded. A patient had the right to refuse care, but that didn't absolve him of his responsibility to make sure it was an informed decision. "You're favouring your left leg, you're perspiring, you're obviously in pain, your blinking reflex is asynchronous, and I don't like the look of those lesions on your neck."

The man's hand moved to cover the patch in the hollow of his left collarbones, eyes narrowing suspiciously. "What do you know about that?" he asked, his voice suddenly a terse whisper.

He knew what it was, then. Julian caught Martok's eye and jerked his head slightly to the right. The Klingon nodded and moved off to take up a determined post four metres away. It wasn't that Julian was about to say anything the Klingon didn't already know, but that he thought the Cardassian might be more comfortable if there was less chance of being overheard.

"It's  _terat rol_ , isn't it?" Julian asked quietly. "You're not the only Cardassian showing signs of it. I'm trying to determine how widespread the problem is, and what causes it."

" _Starvation_  causes it," said the man. He squared his shoulders and held his head high, though it obviously cost him. He swayed again, and Julian cupped his elbow to steady him. He didn't even try to pull away. His next words were proud and haughty. "I am a Gul in the Cardassian Military. Men such as I do not suffer from diseases of the gutter."

It was the same attitude Tain had taken, and Julian was beginning to lose patience with it. But the skin condition was not his primary concern right now. He had an injured man in front of him, and he was starting to hope he could persuade him to accept his aid.

"Gul… what's your name?" he asked, meticulously respectful.

"Gul Nador, formerly of the  _Ventani_ ," the man said stiffly.

"And the Obsidian Order?" said Julian with a narrowing of the eyes. In his dealings with Garak and with Tain he had learned this much about operatives of that shadowy organization: there was nothing they respected more than a person who could see through their pretexts.

Nador curled his unsteady lip. "Perhaps," he said.

"My name is Julian Bashir. As I've told you, I'm a doctor," he said. "A very skilled doctor, with experience treating Cardassians."

The other man snorted. "I heard how you  _treated_  Lugek."

The words stung, but Julian didn't let that show. "I might have been able to do more for him if I'd had access to him after he was beaten at the count," he said. Then with a shrewd twist of the negotiation that would have done Quark proud, he added; "And if you allow me access to your injuries, perhaps I can help you before the matter becomes more serious."

He certainly was feeling optimistic today. The truth was that there wasn't a great deal he could do for anyone in this place, but at least he could try. He waited, knowing better than to press his argument too far, and watched as Gul Nador studied his face pensively. His breathing was growing more laborious and his strength was flagging, but he took his time.

"You are under Enabran Tain's protection," he said at last. It wasn't the response Julian had been expecting, but he could hardly deny it. He was certain it was common knowledge throughout the camp, and probably not merely among the Cardassian prisoners, either.

"So I've been told," said Julian.

Nador's lips thinned to a strained line. "He promised what he could not deliver once, human. Be wary of him."

"Oh, I am," Julian assured him. "I've had… prior dealings… with Tain."

The Gul bared his teeth in a thin rictus of a smile. "A Starfleet officer who has had prior dealings with Enabran Tain? If you ever wish to have a Cardassian in your debt, you could tell me that tale."

"It's not a very good story," Julian lied. "I dropped in on him one evening for a cup of tea."

There was a stunned silence, and Nador's eyes performed their syncopated double-blink again. Then he laughed, a rich, wild sound that cut off sharply in a hiss of pain as he groped for his ribs. His mouth twisted in anguish and he leaned in heavily against Julian's hand. When he mastered himself again, he panted thinly; "You're very spirited for a man who has regular appointments with the Vorta. I appreciate a man with a sense of humour."

"Do you appreciate me enough to let me examine you?" Julian asked. "If it's your ribs, at least I can bandage them. It might make the difference between standing straight for the count, and being in too much pain even to try."

Gul Nador glared up at him, but he was bent almost double with agony even now. Tightly and reluctantly, he nodded. "But if you tell anyone of this, or of the fact that I am suffering from  _terat rol_ , I will kill you — Tain or no Tain."

Julian found a tired smile playing over his lips. "I can see we need to have a talk about Federation doctors," he said. He looked over the bowed, armoured back and caught Martok's eye. "General, can you bring me two rolls of the dark bandages, a small piece of the lint dressing, and the heavier bottle of disinfectant, please?"

Martok looked displeased with the idea of leaving Julian to go alone into a barracks he had not so much as examined, but he seemed to appreciate the greater need. He glowered, but he nodded. Most importantly, he strode off.

Julian took hold of Nador's left hand again, and braced his right arm across the small of the man's back, helping him to shuffle into the sheltered corridor of the pod and down to the door to Barracks 27.

 _(fade_ )

He bound the Gul's ribs and cleaned the abrasions on his face before helping him to settle on his cot. Nador had commanded his cellmates to wait in the corridor until Julian was finished, and they obeyed him despite the fact that three of them were Romulan. Evidently the man wielded some power still, if not precisely the widespread terror Tain could still awaken. Julian said nothing more of his investigation into the nutritional deficiencies in the prison diet; he was not interested in coercing a semiconscious man. He instructed his patient to rest as much as he was able, and to try to find a place in the rear line at tomorrow's count. Nador's quiet acceptance of his instructions was probably a measure of how far gone he was by the time he dozed off under the coarse blanket.

Julian emerged from the barracks to find Martok waiting faithfully at the door. Nador's cellmates had dispersed, probably walking the atrium in an attempt to keep warm. There were many prisoners out there now, and the Klingon and the human moved between them as they made the long, weary trek back to the other side of the dome. Exhaustion had descended on Julian as soon as he no longer had anything more to do for his patient, and he was giddy and unsteady on his feet by the time he reached his own bunk.

Stretching out upon it was a merciful relief, and he didn't care how hard it was, how uneven the pressure of the straps on his body, or how it creaked and groaned as he found a bearable position. It was horizontal, and it was up off the icy floor, and that was all he cared about. Julian hugged his own blanket tight, shivering with cold, fatigue, and lingering fever. His flank throbbed and his eyes ached and he yearned for sleep even as his stomach churned and gurgled emptily. All of that was inconsequential, however. He felt more like himself than he had in what seemed like a very long time indeed. Between his efforts to advance his research, and the care he had given Gul Nador, he felt like a proper doctor. And that was worth the exertions and the lingering pain.

Not contented, perhaps, but at least almost at peace with himself, Julian slept.

 _(fade_ )


	45. The Tempest Breaks

**Part VIII, Act IV: The Tempest Breaks**

The door was locked, and the lights were dim. They thought he was sleeping. He was supposed to be sleeping: the lady in green had told him to sleep. He felt guilty that he wasn't listening to her. His mum and dad had told him to be a good boy, and to listen.

There were people moving around the bed, brisk and efficient. He could hear them murmuring to one another, but he couldn't make out the words. He probably wouldn't have been able to understand them if he had. They always used such long, complicated, nonsense-words.  _Pre-ganglionic fibre. Post-ganglionic nerve_. Gibberish.

One of them took his right arm in gentle, steady hands. Jules tried to pull away. He didn't want them to touch him. He didn't want them to do things to him. Sometimes it hurt, the things they did. Sometimes it only tickled. Always, it was terrifying.

He wanted to speak, to tell them that he didn't want them to touch him.  _I don't consent_ , a voice in his mind said firmly, but he didn't understand what that meant. He was six, and he didn't often understand the things grown-ups said. Neither did he understand why there should be a grown-up in his mind, when usually they just crowded all around him with their machines and their scanners and their tests. The blinking lights were dizzying. He could feel the whir of the equipment in his back teeth.

 _I don't consent!_  The voice in his mind was more urgent now. Someone was holding his ankles. Those hands weren't gentle, but cruel. They were squeezing harder than they had to, dragging on his feet, stretching his right knee painfully. Another pair of hard, hateful hands took his other arm. He could feel the roughness of the fissured skin through the sleeve of the hospital gown. Jules didn't like it. He didn't like it at all. He couldn't make out their faces, far above in the shadows behind the blinking, cycling lights, but he knew they were glaring at him with unwavering hatred. They'd be happy to kill him if they had the chance: as swiftly and as brutally as they were able.

"We need to modulate the frequency of the nanosplicer," the person at his left said. The voice was calm, professional, and yet it scared Jules and it made the voice inside of him angry.  _Don't talk about me like I'm not here! Talk_ to _me, damn it! I'm a doctor: I can understand what you're doing if you'll just take a moment to tell me_!

Jules wanted to make that voice be quiet. He was frightened that the other people would hear it. He didn't know why, but he understood that it was important they didn't know about the inside voice. They couldn't know he was awake, either. The woman in green had told him to sleep. He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't listening, not like a good boy. Jules desperately wanted to be good. If he were good enough the doctors wouldn't make him sick and maybe, just maybe, his parents would come back again. He wanted that more than anything. He wanted to go home.

There were other people moving around, just past the three that held him. He could hear them muttering. Chanting? Muttering. He couldn't make out the words. He didn't know if they were even a language he understood.  _The Universal Translator must be malfuctioning,_ thought the Inside Voice.

 _Be quiet! Be quiet! Oh, please, be quiet!_  Jules begged. He was so frightened. So terribly, terribly frightened. He didn't know what they wanted from him. He'd been in bed, a  _huge_ , soft bed draped with silky linens, in an airy room with a spectacular view of the wooded lake below. What was he doing here, in this cold, cavernous space, surrounded by these muttering shadows?

"This won't hurt a bit," said the person with the gentle hold on his left arm. Jules wanted to weep. At least one of them didn't hate him, didn't want to kill him, to beat him until he couldn't stand for the count — so that they could beat him again for that. He wanted to ask that voice where his mum was, why she had left him here, when she would be back. He didn't dare.

"Just a little tickle," the voice assured him, just before his back exploded in anguish.

 _It's not supposed to hurt!_ the Inside Voice wailed, anguished and above all, indignant. This was an affront to him, to his ethics (what were ethics?), to his sense of professionalism.  _Oh, God, an osteogenic stimulator isn't supposed to hurt!_

"The specimen is stable. Cardiac arrhythmia resolved. Increase the dose by two ekates per minute _."_

That wasn't the kind voice, and it didn't belong to the dead-eyed monsters squeezing his ankles and his right arm. It was one of the other shapes, the ones moving just out of sight while they muttered and murmured and hissed.

"I don't understand how he's fighting the sedation. A dose like this would anesthetize a Jem'Hadar!"

Jules shrank away from the irritation and disapproval in that voice. Had he done something wrong? He knew he often  _did_  do things the wrong way. He couldn't quite figure out how to do them right, not like the other children. Not like his parents wanted. Dad would get so impatient when he made the same mistake again, not understanding how he'd made it in the first place or how to do any differently. Mum would just sigh and look so, so sad. Jules hated disappointing his mother most of all.

His back was still burning: a bubbling, acidic anguish deep in the bone.

 _The rapid regeneration caused by artificial stimulation of the osteoblasts disturbs the careful homeostasis surrounding a fracture, which elicits what is essentially a panic response in the nerves_ , the Inside Voice explained. He didn't say it calmly, though, like one of his professors might have said it. The thought was rapid, frantic, as he desperately tried to rationalize what was being done to him. To Jules. To them.  _The body interprets that as pain._

Jules wanted to whimper. He wanted to cry out and to tell him they were hurting him. Maybe then they would stop. But he knew they wouldn't stop. They didn't care how they hurt him. Worse, they took  _pleasure_  in hurting him.

 _No, they don't,_  he thought bewilderedly. The Inside Voice agreed.  _They're trying to help_ , it insisted _. They genuinely care for their patients, in their own way. They're wrong to want to change you, but they don't want you to suffer. It's not their fault you're so frightened. Where are your parents?_

Jules didn't know, and the fact that the voice seemed to think he should made him even more frightened than before.

He didn't understand what was happening. The scattered pieces of the puzzle were impossible to sort through. He wasn't clever enough for puzzles, not even the pretty one with all the brightly coloured birds, each piece as bit as a saucer. This puzzle was much harder: two Kiras, nose-to-nose, one smiling seductively, the other as bewildered and alarmed as he was. Garak in a military uniform. Odo, but not Odo, mocking him. Slapping him. Pushing him down into the line of bowed backs, treating him like a slave.

"Don't take that tone with us, Terran!"

It was unbearably hot in here, and the clanging thunder of the machinery was deafening. His nostrils were choked with ore dust, his eyes burned, and his hands… his hands were rubbed raw and blistered, open wounds weeping clear fluid. His hands would be ruined if he kept up this toil much longer, and then what would become of him? Jules didn't understand why his hands were so important, or who all these people-but-not-the-right-people were, but he was exhausted and he was terrified. It was difficult even to stay on his feet. It was increasingly impossible to push the laden ore trolley…

"Move your arm," the cold, female voice instructed. "Touch the crown of your head."

He couldn't do it. They were still holding all his limbs: his left arm carefully, the others with bone-crushing force. Jules couldn't help it. He was so frightened. He was helpless. He whimpered.

 _No!_ thought the Inside Voice frantically.  _No, you can't let them know they're getting to you! Don't look down. Don't hang your head. Eyes front, Lieutenant!_

Jules wished the voice hadn't thought that. He knew what was next.

"Spread your legs," a new voice, gruff, bored, and unyielding, demanded. "Ankles three feet apart."

 _Feet? What are feet? My feet? They're so small…_  Jules was terrified to disobey, because his commander was terrified, too, even if he was trying not to show it, and that was so much more frightening than their situation, or the gun, or the things they'd seen outside as the gate clanged shut with sickening finality behind them.

 _Foot. An archaic unit of measure, employed on Earth from antiquity and surviving in common use until the late twenty-first century, predominantly in the United States of America. Equal to 30.48 centimetres._ This voice was different from the other one. It sounded like a woman, but it was tinny and detached. Jules had the feeling he should know that voice, that he heard it every day telling him the things he needed to know — the time, the location of his friends, the status of his experiments (what experiments?) — but he couldn't quite place it.

 _But it doesn't make sense,_  the more familiar Inside Voice protested feebly.  _The wall calendar gave the temperature in Celsius. Why are they still using feet_?

"Legs apart, I said!" the rough voice snapped angrily. There was a clatter of metal. The strap on the rifle. Jules's terror mounted.

The person at the foot of the operating table was spreading his legs for him, prying his ankles apart. It took almost no effort at all: the shadowy form was a soldier, a killer, a genetically programmed executioner dispatched by a ruthless enemy; and Jules was just a little boy. His hips ached as they were stretched, and that seemed wrong to him. They shouldn't ache. They hadn't ached. What was going on?

It wasn't  _his_ hips that hurt, Jules realized. It was his friend's. Martok. Martok was his friend, and he was suffering from calcification of the tendons and a probable torn labrum. Repairing the damage would be a twenty-five minute surgery in the Infirmary on Deep Space Nine, but here, there was nothing he could do. The helplessness was worse than all the rest of it — worse that the fear, worse than his own pain, worse even than the hunger.

Oh, God, he was  _so hungry_. Why didn't they give him something to eat?

"The human is a greedy animal," the woman mocked coldly; "always thinking with its stomach."

_You'd think that before they locked thousands of people into a twenty square block area, they'd give some thought as to how those people were going to get fed._

"Get his card!" a harsh, hunted voice commanded. "Get his food card!"

There was blood on his hands, slick and still hot. Jules felt the tears prickling in his eyes again. He didn't like blood. It frightened him.

"Help him!" That was Commander Sisko's voice, panicked and urgent. "He never would have gotten hurt if it wasn't for us!"

But Jules couldn't help him. He had no medkit. He had no defibrillator, no supply of blood products to replenish what had been lost, no way to seal the wound.  _The Vorta has the medkit…_

"The results from my first set of samples were… anomalous." That was the Vorta again. Tiellyn. Deyos had called her Tiellyn. But what was she doing here? He was in the Sanctuary District, slouched down in a concrete well with the sour smell of another man's sweat infused through his clothes. He was on a biobed in the hospital on Adigeon Prime. He was six. He was twenty-nine. He was thirty-two.

He was Jules. He was Julian. He was  _dreaming_.

God, he was only dreaming! Suddenly it all made sense: the indistinct voices, the garbled memories, the fact that half the time he couldn't make sense of the thoughts in his own head, and half the time he was thinking things that no six-year-old, developmentally delayed  _or_  precocious, should have the vocabulary to think. It was all blurring together: memories of hurt and hopelessness and vulnerability. The Jem'Hadar, immobilizing him for the Vorta doctor. The Adigeon geneticist holding his arm. The voice of Vin, the grizzled old San Francisco police veteran, commanding him through the intake procedures of 2024. Gabriel Bell, the lynchpin of history, bleeding out on the filthy pavement under Julian's useless hands.

He had to wake up, before any of these awful remembrances progressed any farther. Julian tried to focus on his heart-rate. He could hear it on one of the monitors: a slow  _blip-blip_ that was too rapid for deep, healthy sleep, but not nearly quick enough to alert his brain to wake him. He thought about the sound, tried to imagine it picking up speed, narrowing the interval between beats, firing off his sinoatrial node ever more quickly…

"No, you don't,  _Doctor_!" Tiellyn spat his treasured honorific like a curse. It made him feel vile and worthless. Her too-smooth hand closed on his jaw, trapping him. With her other hand, she reached up and switched off the cardiac monitor. The beeping stopped. "You are ours, now. All bodies belong to the Founders."

Sudden, awful agony flared through his left side, and suddenly Julian couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't wake himself. The voices were clamouring around him, warring for supremacy, every single one of them trying to tear him down.

"The specimen is secure. Prepare for transport!"

"Hey, gimme! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Just lie still; this won't hurt a bit."

"Look at you, acting like a spoiled child! How about a little gratitude for all the sacrifices your mother and I have made for you, huh?"

"Begin again."

"You're not accustomed to this workload, are you,  _Doctor?_  You have much to learn!"

It was hellishly hot in here. It was bone-achingly cold. His whole body hurt. His flank was on fire. He couldn't feel anything at all, and didn't even know if his limbs were still attached to him. All the garbled memories had a common thread: vulnerability, humiliation, and the inability to escape.

"Left hand. Other hand."

"Patient is a six-year-old human male, marked developmental delays and some indication of failure to thrive. No gross chromosomal abnormalities. His parents have selected a variety of procedures…"

"Bare-handed surgery,  _Doctor?_ And in the ring, at that."

"You're here to process ore. Have you ever done that before?"

"You see? How  _easy_ it is to lose count. Would you like to begin again?"

"Well,  _Doctor!_  Don't forget to  _scrub_  before you operate!"

"Sit down, shut up, and if you have any questions, don't come to me with them."

" _ _Ç_ _a me dégoûte! Ils sont une abomination, des _Augments!__ "_

He couldn't breathe. He couldn't wake himself. There was only one thing Julian  _could_  do. A trick he'd learned years and years ago, when the nightmares hadn't come just once and a while but almost every night. When he had been just a little boy, unable to understand why his dreams were haunted by alien doctors and strange sounds and blinking lights. He opened his mouth, straining against Tiellyn's cool, invasive grasp to do so, and he screamed.

 _(fade_ )

The sound of his own screams woke him, and Julian found himself flat on his back, rigid against the hard, taut surface of the cot, his voice breaking hoarsely over the third panicked ululation. Unfortunately, the noise had awakened everyone else as well. The night-silent barracks was suddenly in chaos. Parvok cried out. Martok swore. Bunks creaked and groaned and rattled as the occupants tried to roll out of them.

It was Kalenna who reached him first, falling to her knees at his sides and grabbing his wrists where they lay next to either ear. Julian's head thrashed from side to side, then pivoted so that his eyes could lock with hers. He recognized her, knew he was awake at last, and sagged against the thin pallet, in that moment too relieved to feel his mortification.

"Thank God," he whispered, closing his eyes against the sting of perspiration. His whole body was drenched with it: he could feel his sodden undergarments clinging to him, and sticky rivulets were crawling through his dirty hair.

"Are you all right?" Kalenna asked swiftly, the panic fading from her own eyes. She released his arms and started fidgeting with the blanket. "Are you in pain?"

"Are you being murdered, over there, Doctor?" Enabran Tain asked conversationally, grunting as he rocked into a sitting position. "I always thought I'd be the one to kill someone in the night, but from the sound of things, I'm wiling to reconsider that assumption."

"I was dreaming…" Julian breathed. He screwed his eyes closed and drew an icy hand over his face. A first, concussive shiver took him and he rolled gingerly onto his right hip, taking the pressure off of his left flank. The pain there was worse than it had been when he had returned to the barracks for curfew, and it had been pretty damned awful then. The day's exertions hadn't done more than awaken a low, rhythmic ache, but the simple act of urination was torture. He cupped his right cheek in his palm, and gathered a fistful of the coarse, inadequate blanket with his other hand. He was shaking, and not only from the cold.

There was a stentorian groan and a grinding squeak of pipe fittings as Martok rose to his feet. Kalenna looked up at him, sitting back on her heels with a sigh. "It's all right, General," she said. "It was a nightmare."

"That much I surmised," the Klingon muttered gravely. He stood over Julian, casting his head and shoulders in shadow. "You do not look well, Doctor," he observed.

Julian didn't feel well. He was nauseous and he was freezing. His back and his shoulder were now exposed to the cold air, and his teeth kept wanting to chatter. Still, he tried to put on a brave face. "I'll be all right in a minute. I'm sorry I woke everyone."

There was a blur of greyish motion past Kalenna. Parvok had rounded the table and was drawing near. "How can I be of help?" he asked.

Julian thought it was the first time the man had volunteered aid unprompted. But there was nothing Parvok or anyone else could do. He shook his head tightly, and even though he was still horizontal, he felt a shiver of vertigo. "I'll be all right," he repeated.

Kalenna touched his tense fist with her fingertips, then pressed the back of her hand to his brow. "You're freezing," she said uneasily, and she got to her feet.

That wasn't right. He had been running a temperature ever since swimming back to consciousness after his defeat in the ring. He should be warm to the touch, not cold,  _especially_ by Romulan standards… and then sluggishly, Julian understood.

"The fever's broken," he rasped. No wonder he had dreamed such vivid and terrible things. His body had been making one final push to overcome whatever had been brewing in his contused and lacerated kidney. If he had been awake instead of sleeping, he might have been delirious. "It's all right," Julian whispered. "It's a good sign."

And it was, but he was so exhausted. He couldn't even keep his eyes open. They drifted closed of their own volition, and he tried unsuccessfully to nuzzle in more comfortably against the mattress. He was too tired even to fear slumber and the wraiths of memory that might still be lurking there, lying in wait for him.

He heard the others moving: Parvok's worn-out shoes shuffling away, Martok's heavy boots shifting while his armour rattled. Kalenna moved off, too, but she did so with such silent deftness that Julian could only be sure because of the wind of her passage.

"Such a production!" Tain grunted disdainfully from his side of the room. "You'd think he was the first person to have a nightmare in this place."

Julian wanted to speak up in his own defence, to say something appropriately scathing, but he couldn't. Embarrassment was setting in, just as it had done in the Wadi game when Sisko, Kira and Jadzia had all witnessed him using the same strategy to wake himself from what had seemed like an impenetrable nightmare. He knew it was a juvenile way to get out of a bad dream: the coping mechanism of a bewildered little boy, not a grown man and a Starfleet officer. But he'd tried his other methods and they hadn't worked. He wouldn't have been able to bear even a few more seconds of that dream, not with the twist it had taken at the end.

"Here," Kalenna said gently. Julian felt a reassuring weight settle down the length of his body. She tucked her blanket around his shivering frame, closing the gap where his back was exposed to the biting air.

Julian forced his eyes open and sought out her face above him. "No, I can't…" he protested.

"You can," she told him. "Just for tonight. You're shaking."

He was. He was freezing. His teeth were chattering after all. Julian clamped his jaw to silence them, but even his lips quivered as he said; "I'll be fine by morning."

She didn't look very convinced, but her face was also blurring appreciably. Julian blinked once, trying to clear his stinging eyes, and then gave up the effort. He couldn't resist the pull of unconsciousness any longer.

 _(fade_ )

The nutritional study had only just begun, but Julian forced himself to take a day off. He awoke for the count exhausted and shaky, his clothes still damp with sweat and his limbs heavy and aching. He stood at attention for Deyos's usual game of cat and mouse, dropping the count on the flimsiest of pretexts and then dragging on into ever higher numbers to watch the prisoners squirm in desperate hope before smacking them down again. Across the atrium, he saw Gul Nador standing in the back row as instructed. He wore a look of blank anguish on his face, but his stance never faltered. The bandages were doing their work.

When they were allowed to return to the barracks and Tain was ensconced in the wall, Julian undressed. His undergarments were all still wet, and they were unbearably cold against his no longer feverish skin. He thought about simply bundling himself naked into his blanket while his clothes dried, but decided against it. The blanket was coarse and scratchy, and it was far filthier than his undeniably grubby body. Besides, he was cold enough when he wore every garment he owned. He didn't like to think how chilled he would get if he stayed naked for long.

So he put on his jumpsuit and boots again over his bare skin, and laid out socks, trunks, singlet and turtleneck on one of the benches. He wrapped the blanket around himself again and settled on his cot with his back to the wall. Parvok, who had been courteous enough to turn his back while Julian was stripping, came over wordlessly and laid his own blanket across the Starfleet Officer's lap when he had finished.

"Thanks," Julian huffed, watching the steam of his breath curl and dissipate quickly on the dry air. "Only another thirty hours of this, right? Give or take."

"Give or take," Parvok agreed grimly. He looked at the table, and the garments spread over it, and then sat down on the floor instead, next to Julian's feet. He leaned back against the rail of the cot.

Julian felt an irrational squirm of embarrassment under his ribs. Never in his life had he worn the same clothes for so long without a change. The bacteriostatic fabric had slowed down the souring process, but his undergarments were now filthy. They stank, too; not half as badly as the Cardassians' clothes did, nor Martok's, but the odour was appreciable even at this distance. He knew the other prisoners were all in worse straits than he. He knew the state of his clothes was a reflection on the apathy of his captors, not on his own hygiene or work ethic. And yet still, he felt ashamed.

"I'm sorry," he sighed. "I know they smell. I can't spare the water to rinse them: I need what I have to keep myself hydrated."

Parvok shrugged, his padded shoulders rippling. "I've grown used to it," he said. "Human sweat isn't as foul as I expected. The Cardassians, now… that stale fish stink is awful."

"They can't help it," said Julian tiredly, aware that he'd failed to extend that same excuse to himself only a moment before. He raked a hand through his hair, ragged nails raking against his itchy scalp. They scooped up crescents of dead skin and grease, and he wiped them hurriedly on the dirty blanket around his shoulders. "What I wouldn't give for two minutes in a sonic shower."

Parvok made a sound that was almost a laugh. "You'll go crazy, thinking like that. The things you miss, the things you want. First it's a shower, then it's your favourite food. Then it's the ability to walk out into a busy street, or lock your bedroom door. Soon you start missing people you knew, and that's when it gets dangerous."

The first thing Julian had missed had been medical supplies, and that was still the only thing for which he'd really be willing to give any ground to his captors. The rest were just luxuries, weren't they? Cleanliness, a full stomach, freedom, companionship…

No, Julian reminded himself savagely. Those weren't luxuries. They were basic necessities, necessities to which every sentient being was entitled. There were worlds where even animals weren't treated as the Dominion treated its prisoners. The proper response to such privations was outrage, not complacency!

"I think it's important to remember life hasn't always been like this," he said resolutely. "And to know it won't always be this way, either."

Parvok twisted to look up at him. Julian was expecting cynicism. Instead, he saw desperation.

"You have faith in it, then? The escape plan? You think this man Tain's trying to contact will rescue us?" he asked.

Julian thought of Garak, of his drive and determination when he was set on a course. He thought of how tenaciously the tailor had pushed to pursue Enabran Tain last time, when he'd believed the Tal Shiar was trying to assassinate his former mentor. He'd blown up his own shop, for God's sake, just to get Odo and the rest of the crew on Deep Space Nine involved in the endeavour. If after almost two years of believing the man dead he suddenly received a message to the contrary — he'd move the heavens themselves to pursue it. Garak, when his mind was made up, was unstoppable.

"Yes, I do," Julian said. "In fact, I'm certain of it. If Tain can get the message transmitting, and we can all stay alive long enough for rescue to come, we're going to get out of here. No question."

"Oh," Parvok said dryly, staring down at his feet where they lay stretched out before him, ankles crossed. "I thought there had to be a catch."

Julian laughed thinly and reached to grip the man's shoulder briefly. It was gallows humour, considering the stakes, but he appreciated it. Most physicians would.

"The most important thing is to hold onto hope," he said.

Now it was Parvok who laughed, a hard, bitter little sound. " _Hope_ ," he spat. "More Federation optimism."

"That's the nice thing about having a Starfleet officer on the team," Julian said equably. "I've got enough optimism for all of us."

"I just hope you're right," muttered Parvok.

Julian leaned forward a little despite the ache it awoke in his side, and he cuffed the other man lightly on the arm. "You see?" he said. " _You hope_. That's a good start."

Parvok looked up at him again, and this time there was a glint in his eye and the slightest shadow of a grim grin on his lips. "You really are insufferable, human," he said.

Julian nodded sagely. "So I've been told."

 _(fade_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**sinoatrial node:** the natural pacemaker of the heart, responsible for sending the message for cardiac muscle to contract at the beginning of each beat.


	46. Slack Tide

**Part VIII, Act V: Slack Tide**

The following night, Julian was again startled from slumber. There was no nightmare this time — he had not dreamed at all, in fact. Something else woke him, abruptly and with the certainty that something had changed. The room was quiet, with only the soft sleep-sounds of his cellmates and the hum of the circuitry and the low  _whoosh_  of the life support system to fill his ears. Hitching himself up on his elbow, Julian looked around and confirmed that everyone else was motionless beneath their blankets. He lay back again, stiff and still weary. And that was when it came to him.

For the first time in what seemed like weeks, he was neither shivering, nor trying not to shiver, nor sweltering with fever. Warily, he pushed the blanket down around his hips. For days, such an adjustment had been accompanied by a flood of bitterly cold air that seeped through every garment he wore to chill him to the marrow. Now, though his flank felt appreciably cooler, Julian did not feel his whole body tense against the bite. The air was warmer. The asteroid was moving back onto the sunlit side of the gas giant below, and the ambient temperature of the facility had risen again.

Julian pushed himself up into a sitting position, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot. He massaged his right knee. It was healing but still tender, especially after he'd slept on it. He studied the sleeping bodies around him. Martok was lying on the bare straps of his bunk, his blanket gathered tightly around him. Kalenna was almost hidden beyond the General's bulk, one palm tucked up under her cheek. Across the way, Parvok lay facing the wall. The Breen, as always, lay flat on their back. It was impossible to say whether they slept, or lay wakeful. And there was Tain.

Julian rose as quietly as he was able. The cot squealed as he shifted his weight against the rail, and General Martok stirred at the sound. He did not awake, however, and Julian was able to move far more silently as he crossed the room to stand over the Cardassian. Tain lay heavily upon his right shoulder, the flesh of his face and his neck sagging loosely with the pull of the artificial gravity net. His breathing was laboured but rhythmic. Julian ran a quick clock in the back of his mind as he counted the man's respirations. They were too rapid for deep sleep; either Tain was struggling to get enough air, or he was not as unconscious as he looked.

"Are you awake?" Julian said, pitching his voice low enough that he would not disturb the others — or, for that matter, Tain, if he really was asleep.

He wasn't. The left side of his face came alive. It was an eerie sight, with the right side still slack against the miserable little pillow. Half of Tain's mouth smiled, one nostril crinkled, and his left eye opened to fix on Julian.

"Another nightmare, Doctor?" he asked pleasantly. "Would you like me to tuck you in?"

"Are you doing that on purpose?" Julian asked, ignoring the mockery. "Or can you only move one side of your face?"

Tain snorted derisively, but he opened his other eye and equalized the movements of his mouth. "Everything is a medical mystery to you, isn't it?" he groused, rolling onto his back and raising one knee. He folded his hands over his sternum and stared up at the ceiling. "Your friends back on that space station must find it tiresome."

"It wouldn't have been much of a mystery," said Julian, carefully hushed. Just because Tain wasn't inclined to be considerate of the sleepers didn't mean he should meet his speech volume. "The way your heart's been acting up, it could well have been a stroke."

"I can't tell whether my malady troubles or amuses you, Doctor," said Tain.

"Of course it troubles me," Julian said tightly. "Why on earth would it  _amuse_  me?"

"It would amuse a great many people," said Tain. "And most of them have less reason to resent me than you do."

"You're my patient," said Julian. "I don't resent you."

Even as he said it, he could feel the cold, calloused hand clamping over his mouth and pinching his nostrils while tremors of pain shivered up into his fractured cheekbone. He could hear the chuckling scorn in the old man's voice as he said,  _I'm not doing Garak any favours!_

"Don't lie to a liar, Doctor," chided Tain. "From our first meeting, you've disliked me. I put your sainted Federation hackles up. You don't approve of me or my methods, and you think I'm a monster. The bogeyman in the shadows. You're not wrong."

"I don't think you're a monster," Julian said. That much was true. "You're something much more frightening. You're a man without compassion, without a moral code. You must have had both, once upon a time, but over the decades you've trained yourself to forget them. Or to ignore them. I don't know which is worse."

He was starting to feel the slow, deep dizziness that he was starting to suspect had more to do with hunger than with any of his lingering injuries. He took a half-step back from the cot and sat down on the floor, crossing his left leg but leaving the right one bent at only about a hundred degrees. Tain watched him out of the corner of his eye, not troubling to turn his head.

"Well spotted, Doctor," he lauded, darkly amused. "Most people only spot the absence of compassion. It's easy to assume that I have one, of course. A moral code, I mean. Duty to the State, after all, is the highest morality there is — at least for a Cardassian. And I have been a  _very_ loyal servant of the State."

"Have you?" asked Julian dryly. "I think there are some once highly-placed Legates who might disagree with that assessment."

"Oh, the State is bigger than any one politician," Tain said dismissively. "Bigger than any given government, for that matter. The Central Command, the Detapa Council, they're all just puppets. Means to an end.  _Cardasssia_. Now, she is something greater, and I've served her well. But not out of any moral obligation, Doctor. Not for personal gain, either, though there are those who would try to persuade you otherwise. Would you care to guess why I served Cardassia so faithfully?"

He wasn't looking at Julian any longer, not even in the lopsided sidelong fashion he had been before. Yet Julian sensed a curious anticipation from him, as if he anxiously awaited the answer. Julian thought he had one, too.

"Because that gave you power; legitimacy," he said. "And… because it amused you. Being the vengeful, silent fist of the State amused you."

Tain laughed. It was a low, rumbling sound quite unlike his usual grandfatherly chortles and guffaws. It was sinister in a way they were not, but somehow less unsettling. It was less unsettling, Julian realized, because it was more truthful. This was the voice of the inner Enabran Tain — the one few people saw, except perhaps in the depths of some secret interrogation chamber. Julian had seen it twice now. This made a third.

"Verygood, Doctor Bashir!  _Very good_ ," said Tain. "Yes, it amused me. Every bit of it. Don't mistake me: I took pride in my work. Great pride. But I didn't do it out of any sense of obligation or nobility or even ambition. Personal ambition is crippling, Doctor. Don't you find it so? And extremely  _dangerous_."

There seemed to be some meaning behind the words, but Julian couldn't divine it. He was thinking of Parvok's remarks about their enigmatic cellmate, and of his own thoughts about Garak's tenacity. It was tempting to raise the matter with Tain, but he refrained. Everything Julian had seen of the man had made him wary of bringing those he cared about to Tain's attention — particularly Garak.

"Garak, now," said Tain, and Julian couldn't help but jump a little at the man's prescience. He could not have known that name was on Julian's mind, and yet… "He understood that ambition has no place in a productive life. Whatever his failings, he never let personal hubris get in his way."

"A real intelligence agent has no ego," Julian said dreamily, carried back on the wings of memory to a tunnel made of holographic photons. He felt a pang of homesickness so acute it was almost physically painful. "Only a sense of professionalism."

"Precisely!" Tain sounded pleased. Then his eyes narrowed and he finally turned his head to look at the human. "Where did you come up with that?"

Julian felt his expression sour. "It's a long story," he said. "And not one I'd much like to share with you."

"Well, I won't insist," said Tain, tilting his chin back and returning his focus to the ceiling. " _This_ time. But I'm watching you, Doctor. There's more to you than meets the eye."

"Maybe so," Julian said, more because he knew it would irk the Cardassian if he appeared unaffected than because he felt at all comfortable with that idea. He wanted to change the subject. It wasn't that he was averse to a verbal sparring match with a spy. In fact, he thoroughly enjoyed such verbal acrobatics, but only with a less soulless partner. It didn't hurt to have a nourishing, appetizing, calorically adequate meal before him while he did so, either. All in all, this was a hideously poor substitute for his lunches with Garak, and somehow that thought only made the ache in his chest even worse.

"Will you let me take your pulse?" he asked, deliberately steering the conversation into safer waters.

"Will you leave me in peace if I do?" Tain countered.

Julian curled his lip. "This time," he said.

Tain chuckled, which Julian took for a sign he could proceed. He got up on his knees and landmarked for the temporal artery. "Still faster than I'd like," he said when he had taken his count. "Especially since you've been lying down for several hours. I need to know what's going on inside of you. I might be able to get my hands on the scanner from the Vorta's medkit."

"I forbid it," said Tain. "The risk is too great, and the object of the exercise is pointless."

"Your health is the object of the exercise," Julian said. "Maybe your survival."

"And what are you going to do with the information if you  _do_  run a scan?" Tain challenged. "It's your foolish malnutrition study all over again, Doctor. Knowing won't change anything: you'll still be powerless to treat me. And unlike your little study, this carries a substantial risk. Trying to steal a piece of equipment from the Vorta would be suicide."

"Major Kalenna stole a laser scalpel," Julian pointed out.

" _Major Kalenna_  had spent every day of her stay up until that point keeping out of the Vorta's eye," Tain countered contemptuously. "You've chosen a different path for yourself. And while I won't deny it's proved useful at times, it will definitely be to your detriment if a piece of medical equipment disappears again. In fact, I've had to be proactive and put about the word that theft of medical supplies of any kind will be swiftly punished by my own hand — because if so much as a bandage goes missing, Doctor, who do you think the Jem'Hadar will come for?"

Julian hadn't considered this: that another prisoner's subversive acts might be laid at his doorstep. Now Tain said it, of course it made perfect sense. He  _would_  be the most logical suspect, and Deyos would be only too glad to have an excuse to punish him. It was more than a little disconcerting that he had as yet taken no steps to exact revenge on Julian for witnessing his humiliation at the mercy of Tiellyn's sharp tongue. He'd expected the commandant to single him out for arbitrary punishment days ago, and yet Deyos didn't even pause to taunt Julian during the count anymore. Now he paused to consider it, that made him profoundly uneasy.

"Exactly," said Tain with lazy scorn. He heaved his bulk over onto his left side, turning his back on Julian. "Now straighten my blanket and leave me alone. It's the middle of the night, or hadn't you noticed?"

Julian said nothing. He didn't want to reward the aging spymaster for his contemptuous words, even if they were more true than Julian liked to admit. He did as he was told, tugging the rough blanket straight and draping it to cover Tain properly again. Then he returned to his own cot and lay awake for a long time, remembering Garak in his crisp tuxedo.

 _Kiss the girl, get the key. They never taught me that in the Obsidian Order_ …

 _(fade_ )

Julian had reconsidered his approach to expanding his pool of subjects for the study, and after the morning's count, he followed Major Kalenna to Barracks 11. Martok did not like being left behind, but Kalenna had not thought it wise to approach a Romulan Sub-Commander with a Klingon bodyguard.

Darok was already in the barracks when they arrived, sitting on the rearmost righthand cot with his head tipped back against the bulkhead and his eyes closed. He did not open them to see who had entered, but that was hardly surprising: only two of his cellmates were in the room. One was a Karemman, emaciated and obviously exhausted from the ordeal of the count. He lay huddled on his bunk, shaking despite the relative warmth of the air today. The other was another Romulan, his tunic of the same cut and colour as Kalenna's. He was standing guard just inside the door, and though he seemed unsurprised to see the Major, he looked Julian over with hostile unrest.

"Greetings, Sub-Commander," Kalenna said crisply, stopping three metres short of the man's bunk and snapping to neat attention. "May I speak with you?"

Darok did not move. He released a long, slow breath through his nostrils. Coolly, he said; "What do you want of me today, Major? Are you again in need of a dentist?"

A ghost of amusement flickered in Kalenna's eyes, and Julian felt a moment's fearsome admiration for her. She had sacrificed one of her teeth to help him endure the count. Not only had the extraction been painful, performed without anesthetic or even the proper tools, but here, she had no hope of replacing the tooth.  _If we ever get out of here, Major, I'll fit you with a prosthedontic implant indistinguishable from your original molar_ , he promised. Then he caught himself, and forced his mind to rephrase.  _When we get out of here._

"That will not be necessary, Sub-Commander," said Kalenna. Julian didn't know if her rank was equivalent to his or not, but her tone was one of respectful collegiality. "However, there is something every Romulan in this prison is in need of, and not being given. This is Doctor Julian Bashir of Starfleet, and he needs to speak to you about our rations."

Darok opened his eyes then, fixing them on Julian. They were brilliantly green, and piercing. He must have been a formidable sight on the Bridge of a Warbird, dispensing calm commands in battle. Now, a thin smile tugged at his pale lips.

"We've met," he said silkily. "The Doctor, it seems, is something of a thespian."

Julian had entertained a similar thought about Darok during his convincing performance of ineptitude, then unconsciousness, then grogginess in the ring. "I took my cue from the master," he said. "I've never seen anything like what you did in that fight."

Darok tilted his head back appreciatively. "We all have our ways to survive," he said. "What is this about something the my people need?"

"I've initiated a study of malnutrition in the prison population," said Julian. "There's something missing from our diet that's affecting the Cardassians, the Klingons, and the Dosi. In the course of examining Major Kalenna and the Romulan Sub-Lieutenant in my barracks, I've determined that in addition to whatever nutrient they're missing, our diet contains too little copper — if it has any at all — to sustain routine hemoglobin replenishment in Romulans. It's my belief that most of you, perhaps all of you, are chronically anemic."

He expected further questions about this, or at least some comment. Instead, Darok said; "What is a Dosi?"

"They're a race of Gamma Quadrant people," said Julian. "They're commodity merchants and traders, culturally motivated by profit. There aren't any in the camp that I've seen, but one of my cellmates shared a barracks with a Dosi shortly after his arrival in the camp. The Dosi aren't members of the Dominion; my guess is that the man had been captured and replaced by a Founder, as I was."

Darok's eyes widened appreciably. "You were replaced by a Founder? How do you know this?"

Julian felt a sour little smile playing on his lips. "Deyos told me. I think he knew how horrifying I'd find it."

The Sub-Commander made a noise of disgust. "The Vorta delights in tormenting us, each in a unique and hateful way," he muttered. Then his eyes focused like lasers again. "Are their others in the camp who have been similarly replaced?"

"Yes," Julian said. There was at least one he knew of, of course, and he also had his suspicions about the Breen. "I doubt if it's the case with any of the members of the joint fleet: in the Alpha Quadrant, it's believed lost with all hands."

He decided not to muddy the waters with talk of Garak and Odo. This man might not even have been aware of their presence on the flagship, and he surely didn't care what had happened to them if he was.

Darok made a low noise of disgust. "Lost with all hands," he muttered. "I suppose I knew that must be how it was reported." His eyes narrowed and he looked at Kalenna. "How fortunate you are not to leave behind a spouse and children, Major. No one to mourn your death."

That struck Julian as a cruel and unnecessary barb. People without children or spouses still left behind those who would mourn them, even on Romulus. He opened his mouth to castigate Darok, but Kalenna only arched one eyebrow and shook her head ever so slightly at him.

"If I am going to determine whether the other missing nutrient is affecting the Romulan population," Julian said, enunciating a little too distinctly as he forced himself to beat back his anger at Darok in favour of clinical calm; "I need to examine as many of the Romulan prisoners as possible. I was hopeful that you would consent to participate yourself, and that you might lend me credibility to encourage others to do so."

" _Lend you credibility_ ," said Darok, amused. "You're a Federation doctor, and despite that thicket growing on your jaw, you entirely too young even for that. You think  _I_  can lend you credibility? You give me too much credit."

"I think your people respect you greatly," said Julian. "Not just because of your rank and your former position of authority, but because you've faced the Jem'Hadar in the ring repeatedly, and by your wiles avoided any serious injury. Not every species in this place would appreciate your talent for deceiving your enemy, but the Romulans do. And so do I."

"You're right. They do," said Darok. "But  _you_? I've heard about your bouts, Doctor. You didn't exactly try to implement my methods, did you?"

"No," said Julian. "I couldn't. That doesn't mean I don't admire your skill."

"I suppose Starfleet officers are taught they must  _resist_  if captured," Darok said with idle contempt. "Your Federation nobility is liable to get you killed in this place, Doctor Bashir. And your notion of performing a scientific survey here is ridiculous. How will you collect the data? Tabulate results? Perform any meaningful analysis?"

"My study methodology isn't of any importance to you," said Julian. "Your health and the health of your people is."

"What makes you think I feel any obligation towards 'my people'?" asked Darok. "My obligation to them was destroyed with my vessel."

"I don't believe that," said Julian. "I think you still feel a responsibility towards them, even if you're not able to do all you wish you could to help and protect them. I think you're a noble man and a good commander."

Darok scoffed. "Why would you think anything such thing?" he sneered. "You don't know me."

Julian's certainty came from one thing alone: Kalenna respected this man. She had not said as much, not explicitly, but it was clear from the way she spoke of him and to him. More significantly still, it was him she had gone to when she needed help extracting her tooth. And he'd done it, apparently without question or price. So that was another factor in his favour: something else that only a man who retained some sense of command responsibility would do.

"I have my reasons," he said resolutely.

Darok studied him thoughtfully, scratching at the little cyst in his nasolabial crease with the side of one long thumb. "Very well," he said at last. "I will submit to your examination. I will make no introductions for you among the other Romulans, but you have my leave to invoke my name when you approach them. Let it be know you have my cooperation, and that I consider this endeavour… less than futile."

Julian found himself smiling, a small but genuine smile. "Thank you," he said. "That's all I ask."

_(fade)_

He surveyed two more barracks — 11 and 12 — before ration call. Kalenna went with him, silent and watchful. Julian was tabulating his results in his mind as they made their way back to Barracks 6 to collect their canteens, but all thought of nutritional disease faded as the doors shrieked open and he saw what was happening in the narrow room.

Parvok had been looking out at the door, on watch for Tain inside the wall. The Breen was sitting on their cot, impassive in their eyeless helmet. But Martok was at his feet at the far end of the barracks, sweeping slowly into the position called the  _KoH-man-ara_. He was performing his  _Mok'bara_  exercises.

"Oh,  _no_ ," Julian said flatly as the door slammed to behind him.

Martok looked up from his flexed palm and planted his foot resolutely. "Doctor," he said with gruff courtesy.

"They're putting you back in the ring," said Julian. He took two steps forward and sank down on the nearest bench. "You're not ready to go back. Your hand needs at least another week immobilized." At least. With the weakness in his fifth finger, it might be a month or more before the General could go without the bandages.

"It has been four days," said Martok darkly. "The Jem'Hadar seldom wait longer. The Cardassians are poor sport, so I must serve." He held up his right hand, nodding at the careful dressings. "You must assist me, Doctor. I cannot fight with my fingers splinted."

"If you try to fight with that hand, you're going to dislocate some of those joints again," Julian warned miserably. This was like some nightmare sentence out of the Hades of Earth mythology: the doctor, condemned for all eternity to patch together the same patient over and over again, only to see him thrown back into the arena with the heartless foe determined to undo the healer's work again and again.

If it felt like hell to him, how must it feel for Martok?

"It must be done," the Klingon growled. He was shifting into his next position. When Worf performed these exercises, he did so with a lithe athletic prowess and a perfect flow of energy and motion. It was an awe-inspiring thing to witness. Martok's movements were just as accomplished, but they were stilted and strained. When he lifted his right leg as he had his left, his body wobbled for an instant as his calcified hip struggled to take the weight. His left elbow was obviously stiff, and could not straighten as the right had done. The hard set of his mouth spoke not of meditative serenity, but of relentless pain.

But Julian saw his determination, also, and the gleam of anticipation in his eyes. Despite the physical toll and the futility, Martok lived for these battles — perhaps as much as he lived for the hope of escape. They gave his continued existence purpose, and Julian could not take that away with his physician's caveats and his qualms about his patient's continued welfare.

"I can bandage the three damaged fingers together," he said. "Without the splint, they might not hold up to the rigours of battle, but at least I can make sure you've got something approaching normal mobility for your forefinger and thumb. I'll re-bandage your elbow, too: you can use all the support you can get, and your sleeve will hide the dressing."

Martok bared his teeth and nodded appreciatively. "You are a rare man, Doctor," he said. "Not many healers, I think, would be willing to meet a warrior halfway in such an enterprise. I am grateful you would show me such respect."

Julian nodded his acknowledgement of the praise. He understood that the proper form called not for thanks, but for reciprocity. "It is an honour to tend the wounds of a hero," he said.

Martok scoffed. "I am no hero," he muttered, a shadow crossing his face. He shifted out of his pose prematurely and stumped to the other table. He sat heavily, rubbing unconsciously at his hip. "Only a tired old battle hound, who fights as much out of stubbornness as for the memory of lost honour."

"Don't discount the importance of stubbornness," Julian said. Dryly, he added; "What do you think has got me where I am today?"

Martok stared at him for a moment, taken aback. Then he laughed.

 _(fade_ )

In the end, Julian had to reduce three dislocations, all of them reprises of earlier injuries. The critically compromised fifth finger had given out mere seconds into the match, the first time the General had gotten a grapple hold on his opponent. He had faltered only a moment, and fought on. He took several hard falls and several brutal blows, struggling to his feet again each time to slap the post. Julian didn't know when the distal interphalangeal joint on his third finger gave out; Martok had given no sign at all that time. It was possible he hadn't even noticed himself until they were back in the barracks.

It was the left elbow that had proved his undoing in the end. All of the Jem'Hadar were aware of that weakness now, and the strategy today's opponent employed was to try to put as much strain on that joint as possible. Martok managed to evade the early attempts, and then to guard his arm skillfully for a while longer. But in the end, the Fourth got the hold he needed and flung Martok to the ground, wrenching the elbow out of alignment as he fell. The warrior's howl of outrage and anguish seemed to make the dome itself shudder, and try though he might he had proved unable to rise again after that.

Julian and Kalenna helped him back to the barracks, where Julian reset and re-bandaged the joints and did what he could for Martok's other injuries. He had a cracked rib and widespread intercostal bruising. There was a hematoma forming on the crest of his pelvis. His mouth was bleeding, but thankfully no teeth were cracked, loosened, or lost. His one eye was blackened and already swelling glossily by the time Julian finished with the other hurts.

"You fought valiantly," he murmured as he drew up his blanket over the shuddering body stretched out on the cot. He'd laid Martok's under him, to keep out the draft that rose between the bare webbing of the bunk. It felt curiously empowering to be the one sharing his blanket this time, instead of the recipient of the generosity of others. It felt like he was repaying his friend in some small way for his kindness. "There is no shame in an honourable defeat. Even an inferior opponent, if uninjured, can best a battered champion."

Martok made a noise of bitter disgust. "Is that what I am in your eyes, Doctor?" he scoffed. His lips moved awkwardly to form the words: his face was badly bruised. "I pity you, if I am your champion."

"Save your pity for the Jem'Hadar," said Julian with a sad little smile. "If other Klingon warriors are half as dauntless as you, they'll never conquer the Empire."

Martok closed his eye resolutely and turned his face in towards the cot, but Julian thought he saw a grim little twitch of defiant pride on the lacerated lips as he did so.

 _(fade_ )

Three days passed without incident. Julian couldn't quite believe it, not when it was happening nor in the weeks to come, but the residents of Barracks 6 had three days of what passed for peace in Internment Camp 371. They stood for the count and drew their rations. Tain worked inside the barracks wall while the others took it in turns to stand guard. Martok spent most of the first day sleeping through the pain of his injuries, and then resumed his duties as Julian's bodyguard as the Federation doctor surveyed six more barracks. Out of thirty-six prisoners, he examined seventeen Romulans, eight Cardassians, two Hunters, a Karemman, and a member of a Gamma Quadrant species called the Gleppa, whose physiology was unfamiliar to Julian. He gathered the data anyway, and wondered what encounters the Federation had had with the man's people, that his language was programmed into the Universal translator.

Julian had only two people refuse to let him examine them, both Cardassians. Two more sullen Glinns declined the physical exam but consented to answer questions. It was plain the Cardassians mistrusted him, but equally plain that his actions in the ring had impressed them. The other two prisoners from whom Julian gained no data at all were Gamma Quadrant aliens with whom he couldn't communicate. He tried to make himself understood with hand gestures, but to no avail. Julian didn't persist too far, either, in point of fact. Like the Gleppan man, he didn't know anything about their anatomy and wouldn't have been able to do much with the data he gathered.

On the morning of Julian's twentieth Dominion Standard Day in the camp, he woke up feeling stronger than he had in weeks. His kidney was healing, and the pain in his flank had dulled to a persistent, grinding ache that only flared if he stretched too quickly, or while he was relieving himself. He had persistent gross hematuria — every two days, he had been using the makeshift bedpan so that he could inspect his urine as he couldn't do in the waste reclamation unit — but it wasn't as pronounced as before. More often now, he saw grainy little clots and clumps instead of just the diffuse orange tint, and that was a good sign. Clotted blood was old blood. He believed the bleeding had resolved itself, and his body was now clearing away the detritus.

As Julian took his customary place in the line of prisoners, nearest the arena at the end of the front row, he was saddened by how routine this had all become. He still loathed this daily exercise in attrition and humiliation, when the prisoners were reminded again and again of their powerlessness. But it was a part of his daily life now, and he sometimes found it hard to remember what mornings had been like back on Deep Space Nine. He forced himself to call it all to mind down, in as much minute detail as possible.

The computer would wake him with its pleasant, passionless female voice.  _The time is 0700. hours_ , it would say. Or  _0500_. Or, if he'd been on the fourth watch the night before,  _1300_. Julian supposed that wasn't technically morning: 1300 hours was noon, Bajoran time. But on those days, he still went about his morning rituals. Roll onto his back in his soft, sturdy bed. Stretch and luxuriate for ninety seconds before getting up. Bare feet on clean, warm carpet, all the way to the bathing area. And then a shower. A quick in-and-out in the sonic unit, if he was in a hurry. A slow, luxuriant soak under the sprays in the Cardassian steam bath if he had the time. Julian didn't often make use of the tub itself, but he loved the feeling of hot water pummelling his shoulders and massaging his scalp and running over his body.

Deyos was counting now, his droning voice pitched with ill-concealed glee in anticipation of the game. Julian didn't bother listening for the first time he "lost count". He was carried away in his imaginings.

The pure sensual pleasure of lathering up the soft, fragrant soap and scrubbing himself — neck, shoulders, axillae, chest. Julian had a specific order to the way he washed himself. It wasn't something he'd ever really thought about, but it was a habit he'd fallen into as a teen, and it had stuck with him even through the years when he'd been at the Academy, using sonic showers almost every day and rarely indulging in the decadence of hot water and soap. He imagined going through that ritual now, scraping off weeks of accumulated scum and grime. He bought his soap from a Bajoran couple on the Promenade who specialized in body care and cosmetics. It was hand-made in Musilla Province, and it was far more luxuriant than anything he'd ever used on Earth. Julian could almost smell it now, instead of the fermenting odour of his own sweat and the cumulative reek of two hundred unwashed alien bodies around him.

He imagined doling out a dollop of shampoo and working it into his hair. He had to close his mind to that thought very quickly, however, because his scalp immediately began to itch ferociously. He was beginning to think he missed clean hair more than any of the rest of it — even being able to bathe his genitals and perineum. They were provided with the means to sanitize after defecating, at least, though there was little to be done about perspiration. Julian could forget about the state of his trunks now and then, but he never forgot about the greasy, crawling feeling of his unwashed head.

 _Enough about the shower,_  he told himself firmly. Really, he knew he ought to abandon this whole line of thought completely, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. Clean and invigorated, he'd step out and towel himself off. He usually shaved in the steamy warmth of the bathroom, the sonic razor leaving no fallen hairs to make him itch. He'd comb his hair neatly, and inspect himself in the mirror, satisfied by his tidy, youthful appearance. Then it was time to put on a fresh uniform. He remembered how crisp the black fabric felt under his hands when he took a new jumpsuit from the closet; how soft and decidedly  _un-oily_  newly-laundered undergarments were against clean skin. And the welcome warmth of a new pair of socks as he slid his feet into boots that had been given the night to air out and were no longer humid and damp.

Next came breakfast. Julian's mouth watered at the passing recollection of the word. The idea of being able to have something to eat — and not just something, but  _anything_  he wanted or could possibly imagine — before he had to be out in the world, putting on a brave face and enduring the exertions of the day was… well, it would have been unimaginable, if it hadn't been the life he'd been brought up to. Julian tried to stop himself, but he couldn't help it: he imagined moving casually to the replicator, as if it weren't the single most miraculous invention in human history, and asking for scones and jam.

The thought made him feel dizzy, and his empty stomach clenched and churned within him. All of a sudden he was excruciatingly aware of his hunger, and the fatigue of chronic caloric inadequacy. The meagre daily ration wasn't enough to satisfy him even in the hour after the meal. Now, more than thirty hours since food had last passed his lips, the famine was almost unbearable. Julian tried to get a grip on himself, telling himself that it was all in his head. He was ravenous, but he  _wasn't_  starving, even though his body seemed to think he was. He'd be fed in a little more than three hours. It wouldn't be enough, not by half, and it wouldn't satisfy his taste buds or his cravings for the foods he loved and missed so acutely, but it would be something. He ought to be grateful they gave him anything at all…

He was just mustering his horrified rebellion against that insidious thought when the _clack_  of good shoes on stone reached his ears, and Deyos stepped in front of him.

" _Well_ , Doctor!" the Vorta said, savouring the syllables. "You look awfully far away, there. Escaping for a few minutes in the fertile fields of human imagination, were you? We can't have that. There is no escape from  _my_  internment camp, not even in your mind."

Julian forced his eyes to focus on the pale, smirking visage before him. It wasn't easy. His vision was blurred, probably with inanition and the lightheadedness that was the inevitable result of standing at attention while his body struggled to squeeze the last few milligrams of glycogen from his liver. Deyos tilted his head to one side, speculative and malicious.

"Your time is up, Doctor," he said, pitching his voice low in a grotesque parody of intimacy. "Tiellyn gave you one week's grace. That ended yesterday. You're  _my_  prisoner again, and I have some questions for you."

Julian wished he were a man of greater courage. Maybe then he wouldn't have felt the cold, coursing dread that slithered through his veins at those words. He did the only thing he could do in the circumstances, and schooled the features of his face. He didn't let his expression betray his terror, and he didn't flinch as the Vorta flicked a disdainful hand less than a centimetre from the tip of his nose.

"Take him to the control room," he commanded the Jem'Hadar. "I'll join you shortly." He moved on to the next pair of prisoners and smiled unctuously up at General Martok, who had stiffened at the words and was now clearly preparing to step forward as Julian was yanked from the line.

"Don't, General," Julian said resolutely, relieved that his voice came out steady, firm, and valiant. At least his larynx had courage, even if his knees felt like they had turned to rubber. "This is my battle."

Martok glowered, but subsided back to his rigid position in the line. He understood what Julian was attempting to say. As the Starfleet officer could do nothing for him while he was engaged in combat with the Jem'Hadar, so the Klingon warrior could do nothing for Julian now. It was senseless to try.

Julian squared his shoulders as best he could against the hard hands that grasped him. He held his head high as he was led up the line of wary, weary faces. So he'd been given a week's reprieve on Tiellyn's instructions, had he? He wondered if that meant she wanted him kept alive. He hoped so, even though that would surely have repercussions for him in the long run. Despite the daily miseries of the camp, he very much wanted to survive long enough to get home.

 _Home_. He let the image of Deep Space Nine fill his mind's eye as he was yanked over the threshold into the administration pod. Whatever was coming, he would remember who he was and where he belonged. That thought gave him courage.

 _(fade to black_ )


	47. Teaser: Bullseye

**Part IX, Teaser: Bullseye**

The sofa still wasn't in the right place. Miles O'Brien heaved his shoulder against its side and shoved, shifting it about a quarter of a metre closer to the interior bulkhead. He straightened up, stepped back, and scowled. Still in the wrong spot.

Looking around, you couldn't even tell there had been an explosion, a hull breach, and a devastating decompression in this room. You couldn't tell that two people had died here. The structural repair teams had sealed the breach and replaced the shattered portholes. The interior maintenance crew had laid new carpets and refitted the lights. Miles himself had spent an afternoon at the manufacturing replicator in Cargo Bay 8, reproducing the furniture, ornaments and toys that had been destroyed in the blast or subsequently vented into space.

Everything in the O'Brien family living room had been replaceable — Keiko's priceless heirlooms had been safely tucked away in one storage facility or another since their daughter started crawling, and the most sentimental of Molly's artwork was in the tritanium archive chest in the bottom of the bedroom closet. Keiko was never going to leave Miles alone with her bonsai trees again, and Leeta was plant-sitting. When she and her mother got back to the station the day after tomorrow, Molly wouldn't even know that anything had happened here. But Furel and Lupaza weren't bloody well replaceable, and neither was Miles O'Brien's peace of mind.

He hadn't known the two Bajoran freedom-fighters well; he'd spent one awkward evening with them, that was all. But while he'd felt uncomfortable and left out of the conversation, he'd seen how Kira came alive when she talked with them, reminiscing about shared hardships and triumphs as old soldiers do, teasing one another and swapping esoteric jokes that outsiders weren't meant to understand. Even in the wake of the earlier murders, the two weathered houseguests had got the Major laughing, and Miles had been so grateful to them for that. Nerys had loved them deeply; that had been obvious. Their deaths were devastating for her.

She hadn't spoken of them since returning to Deep Space Nine. She hadn't spoken about any of it, actually, and Miles hadn't had the heart to ask. Kira had been grim and silent yesterday, and today she had emerged from her room in a pristine uniform, exchanged a few brisk pleasantries with him over breakfast, and marched off to Ops for her half-watch of light duty. Miles's first reaction had been to be furious with Julian for approving even that, but when he'd bumped into Nerys later in the morning he'd understood why the Doctor hadn't recommended she start on her parental leave straight away. The work had done her good: she'd been her usual strident self again, at least until after supper.

She had hit a wall about an hour ago, suddenly silent again, gazing out the window with a thousand-yard stare. When Miles suggested she might want to make it an early night, she hadn't even protested. She had retreated to her bedroom, and all had been silent since. Miles had been left to resequence the dirty dishes, reorganize his toolkit, and resume his battle with the couch.

He pushed it with one calf, angling the right side slightly closer to the door to Kira's room. That wasn't right, either. Miles was a detail-oriented man when it came to his work; most engineers were. But at home, he wasn't the type of person who usually cared if things had been moved or rearranged. That was a good thing, when you lived with a lively child like Molly, and he prided himself on being easygoing about the state of his quarters. But for some reason he couldn't understand, Miles was profoundly distressed that he couldn't get the sofa back where it belonged. It made his chest feel tight and his breathing go ragged just looking at it, and that made him irrationally angry.

"Stupid bloody thing!" he snapped, and he kicked it. The couch slid another couple of centimetres, the new carpet squeaking a little beneath it. That put it further askew than ever, and it was only Kira's (hopefully slumbering) presence in the next room that restrained Miles from a roar of rage.

The door chime chirped. "Come in!" he snarled, without even pausing to wonder if he  _wanted_  whoever-it-was to enter. He damned well wasn't in the mood to socialize, but by the time he considered this, the door was already sliding open to reveal the bluish glow of the lights in the corridor.

And Julian Bashir, bottle in hand, wearing his new duty uniform and a maddening grin.

Miles scowled. "Oh," he said flatly. "It's you."

"In the flesh!" said Julian, as if this were somehow wildly funny. He stepped over the threshold and let the door hiss closed, then brandished the bottle. "I come bearing gifts!"

"I'm not interested," Miles said, turning his back and stalking over to the window. He still hadn't forgiven any of the senior staff for charging off on the  _Defiant_  in search of Kira without so much as telling him they were going. He hadn't even known he was in charge of the damned station until Latara had called him with a question about docking clearance. He knew why Sisko had left him behind, but the fact that the Captain had probably been right to do so didn't take away the sting.

And as for Doctor Julian Bashir, Miles had more than one bone to pick with  _him!_

"I thought you could use a drink," Julian said, coming further into the room. In the shadowy reflection on the porthole, Miles could see him move to set the bottle on the table. He went to the replicator and pressed the control pad. "You've had a rough week."

"Yeah, well, I'm not the only one," Miles muttered bitterly.

"True," Julian said, more solemnly now. "But as her physician, I can't very well encourage Major Kira to have a glass of scotch, now can I? That'd be awfully irresponsible."

In spite of himself, Miles chuckled. He felt instant annoyance a the response: Julian didn't have any right to make him laugh. He never should have left Nerys alone after her surgery, and he  _certainly_  shouldn't have gone to Quark's while she was lying in his infirmary, traumatized and in recovery! If he'd stayed, maybe he could have prevented her from charging off on her little crusade.

 _And maybe if he had, that psychotic Cardassian would have got to her before she got to him_ , another part of his brain argued.  _Everything's going to be all right now: the killer's dead, Nerys is alive, the baby's fine. Everyone's going to be all right_.

Eventually, maybe. For now, Kira was still mourning the deaths of five old friends, Miles was still hurting from his crewmates' well-meaning abandonment, and the damned sofa was still in the wrong place!

"It looks good in here," Julian said, coming from the replicator with two empty tumblers. He opened the bottle and poured. Miles couldn't see how much he doled out: the reflection in the window was too dim and imprecise for that, distorted by the angle. The rich, oaky smell of real whisky wafted across the room. It wasn't enough to soften his displeasure towards his friend, but it did encourage him to turn around.

Julian picked up both glasses and held one out invitingly. He was still looking around the room. "Keiko and Molly will never know the difference."

"That's the general idea," Miles muttered. He took a step towards the Doctor, but didn't close the distance entirely. He didn't reach for the glass, either. "Keiko and I have decided not to tell Molly what happened. She doesn't need to know, and it'd only scare her."

Julian nodded, stretching his arm a little farther and raising his eyebrows questioningly. Miles relented, as much to ease the social awkwardness as to oblige the younger man. He took the glass and raised it to his lips. Julian mirrored the gesture, and they each took a sip.

It was the good stuff. Must've come from Quark's special reserve. Miles wondered how much of Julian's leisure stipend he'd used to procure the bottle. He could have ordered one free of charge from any of the distilleries in Scotland, of course, but it took at least a week to get anything shipped from Earth. If he'd picked it up on short notice, it had to have come from Quark.

"It's good," Miles said flatly.

"I'm glad," said Julian. It was an odd thing to say: he knew a good scotch from a bad one just as well as Miles did. Well,  _almost_  as well, anyway. When it came to spirits, an Irishman would always have the edge over an Englishman, and that was just the truth of the matter. Pride in his homeland was forgotten in astonished vindication, however, at Julian's next words.

"The sofa's in the wrong place, though."

"I know!" Miles yelped. "I can't seem to get the bloody thing back where it belongs!"

Julian nodded thoughtfully, studying the layout of the room. The last time he'd been over for a visit had been just after he got back from his medical conference, the night before the O'Brien ladies had departed for Earth. Keiko had invited him to dinner, but he'd declined, pleading a busy day in the Infirmary. Undaunted, she had insisted on a late-night dessert, and Julian had relented. He'd joined them for handmade manjū and tea, with a special appearance by Miss Molly O'Brien, who had wandered out in her nightgown to investigate the nocturnal happenings. Miles and Keiko had let her sit up, reasoning that she'd have plenty of time to sleep on the transport in the morning.

"Here, give me a hand," Julian said now, setting his glass down next to the bottle and striding purposefully to the sofa. He beckoned Miles over. "Take the other side."

Miles rolled his eyes. "I've been trying off and on for two and a half days," he said. "I can't get it right. You're not going to do any better."

Julian gave him a look of good-natured exasperation, and Miles found himself setting down his own drink and moving to do as he was told. The physician took hold of the back with one hand, and the armrest with the other. Miles did the same.

"Right," said Julian. "We're going to lift on my count, and move it twelve centimetres to my left and three centimetres closer to the window. And you're going to make sure your side's squared off parallel to the window."

"It's a curved window, Julian," Miles said exasperatedly.

It was his friend's turn to roll his eyes. "You know what I mean. Ready? On three. One, two, three, lift!"

They lifted in unison, and Miles shuffled awkwardly to carry out his friend's instructions. "A little more to your right," Julian said, watching the sofa intently. "Too far. Back to your left, just a hair… there!"

They set down the piece of furniture, and Miles stared in amazement. They had done it. The sofa was back where it belonged, perfectly aligned relative to the rest of the suite of furniture, to the walls, to the entrance. He felt an absurdly intense wave of calm wash over him, and tension he hadn't even known he was carrying ebbed from his neck and shoulders. The couch was in its place, and the room was restored to its old appearance. Gazing about him, he could almost forget the charred, gaping husk he'd walked in on after leaving Julian in Quark's, the bulkhead ripped wide and only a containment field holding back the deadly vacuum of space.

Julian was studying the sofa thoughtfully. "Not quite…" he murmured. He bent at the waist and pushed his side firmly but very slowly. The couch nudged another half-centimetre or so towards Miles, and then stood still. Julian straightened, dusting his hands in satisfaction. "Much better," he said.

He strolled back to the table to retrieve his scotch. Miles came after him, frowning. "You're making fun of me," he said.

"Not at all!" said Julian. "Order is important. A place for everything, everything in its place, isn't that the expression? The room's just right now."

"There's no way that couch was half a centimetre off," Miles groused. He retrieved his glass and bolted back a mouthful of the potent fluid. It burned warmly all the way down his throat, and he savoured it. "I just want things to look like they did, all right? For Molly and Keiko, not for me!"

That wasn't true. It  _was_  for him, as much as for any of the other people in the household. Maybe more so. He couldn't express how much better he felt with the couch back where it belonged. He didn't want to express it: he was worried it might make him sound crazy.

"I'm not making fun of you, Miles," Julian pledged mildly. He nodded at the bottle. "More whisky?"

Miles relented. "All right," he muttered. "It  _is_  good stuff."

Julian nodded and poured another two fingers. Watching his face, serene and affable tonight, Miles started to think that maybe he was being unfair. Normal people wouldn't notice if a piece of furniture was a few millimetres off its usual spot, especially not a piece of furniture in  _someone else's home_. But then, Julian wasn't exactly a normal person, was he? He was one of those incandescently brilliant scientist types who measured physiological changes in microorganism cultures to the nanometre. He had always been a little eccentric, and his own quarters were usually pristine unless he was in the middle of a research project. Maybe he  _had_  noticed a small irregularity. Either that, or he'd just been making a show of precision — not to mock Miles, but to demonstrate to him he took the task seriously.

Yes, he decided, that sounded just like Julian: putting in a well-intentioned effort to reassure his friend, and falling just a little short of the mark. He'd come leaps and bounds in his interpersonal skills since those first unbelievably awkward months he'd spent annoying everyone on the station — well, everyone but Dax, who had seemed to find his eager-to-please ebullience endearing from the first — but the truth was that Julian still didn't always  _quite_  hit the mark in social situations. In the old days, Miles had found his missteps annoying beyond belief. With the wisdom of the years and the ripening of their friendship, he'd come to understand that Julian had fumbled so badly in the early days because he'd somehow reached the age of twenty-seven without really learning how to interact with others outside of a professional context. Though he never would have admitted it to his friend, Miles was proud of how far Julian had come in the last five years.

"I'm sorry for shouting at you," Miles said instead, swirling his whisky and watching the amber whirlpool subside. "When you called on subspace. You know, a few days ago."

"No harm done," Julian said pleasantly. "You were upset: I understand completely."

Miles frowned at him. "What, is that all?" he asked. "You're not going to put on a show and make me feel bad? Make me grovel with my apology?"

Julian shrugged. "Why should I? You just said you were sorry. I'm sorry, too: it was a misjudgment on my part to leave the Infirmary when I did, and I could have tried to talk the Captain into bringing you along on the hunt."

Something about the way he said  _the hunt_  made Miles a little uncomfortable, but his friend's easy affability was too pleasant to make him want to question it too deeply. A quarter of an hour ago, he would have welcomed the chance to yell at someone, perhaps especially his best friend. But now the whisky was warming his limbs and blurring the edges of reality ever so slightly but absolutely deliciously. And the sofa was back where it belonged.

"I guess that's all right, then," Miles said. He pulled out one of the dining chairs and straddled it heavily. Julian drew out another, sliding into it with considerably more grace. Miles threw back his head and drained his glass again with a satisfied grimace.

Julian was watching him thoughtfully, holding his own glass as if out of habit alone. He hadn't even finished his first helping of liquor.

"Something I can do for you?" Miles asked, a trifle sarcastically.

The Doctor smiled. "Not at all," he said. "Only… do you want to sit around here all evening? I thought maybe we could go to Quark's."

"What's the point of going to Quark's?" asked Miles, reaching for the whisky bottle again. "We've got everything we need right here."

Julian shrugged. "I thought maybe a change of scenery… we could play a game of darts…"

Miles was about to dismiss this with a scoff, but then he paused to consider. A change of scenery  _did_  sound good. He'd been spending more time than he liked in here lately. He wasn't accustomed to his own living room being a worksite for damage control teams, and right now his quarters didn't really feel like home. They would in the morning, he hoped, when he came out of the bedroom and saw everything — the sofa very much included — back exactly where it belonged. But tonight, he would welcome a diversion.

"You know what?" Miles said, leaning forward to put the cap back on the bottle. "Darts sounds fine by me."

"Splendid!" said Julian, grinning broadly. He got to his feet and started for the door.

"Hey!" Miles called him back, nudging a thumb at the glass with its remaining couple of centimetres of whisky. "Aren't you going to finish that?"

Julian's smile tightened just for an instant, but he wheeled back affably enough. "Of course," he said, and he drained the tumbler.

They didn't say much as they strode up the corridor and rode the turbolift to the promenade, Miles feeling the pleasant buzz of not-quite-inebriation take hold as they went. After only one measure of scotch, Julian was probably still stone cold sober, but that was all right. Might give him an edge in the game. Miles felt a bit guilty about how often he bested his friend at darts. He wasn't one to keep track, but he thought he won about three out of every five games on the average. Julian was always a good sport about it, but Miles worried sometimes that his friend might lose interest if his game never improved. Julian Bashir wasn't the type to settle for second, med school salutatorian notwithstanding. It was Miles who'd first suggested they take up darts, and it was Miles who came out ahead more often than not.

It hadn't been that way with racquetball. The first few games they'd played, Julian had mopped the court with him. When the doctor had finally fallen behind in the score, it had been thanks to some kind of quantum interference altering the probability constant of spacetime. After that, Miles's game had gradually improved as he had earned back his stamina over the course of dozens of matches that had helped to fill the empty evenings during Keiko's first expedition to Bajor. Even then, though, Julian had come out the victor far more often than he. He'd never gloated — he had actually often seemed almost abashed when he won. At least he'd never again tried to throw a game as he had during their second bout. That had been embarrassing and insulting. Playing a vigorous match against a former Medical Academy team captain and a sector champion (who was ten years his junior, no less!) was far more satisfying, even when Miles lost by half a dozen points.

Maybe Julian felt the same about darts. Miles didn't have the credentials, maybe, but he had the skill. His forty-seven game winning streak was a glowing memory of glory. It had ended abruptly, with a torn rotator cuff and an emergency tour of Julian's operating room, but it had been magnificent while it lasted! And honestly, Miles wasn't even bitter about the way it had ended. Quark had lost a bundle paying out on his forfeit, having offered fifteen-to-one odds on his Vulcan opponent. Tweaking the bartender's nose was always good for a chuckle or two.

Quark was at his usual post as the two friends strolled into the bar.

"Good evening, gentlemen!" he said warmly, hurriedly laying aside the goblet he'd been polishing and rounding the bar to fall into step beside them. "Can I interest you in a holosuite? Number 2 is vacant right now: you could go right up!"

Miles cast him a skeptical look. "Slow night in the holosuites?" he asked.

Quark didn't even try to obfuscate. He scowled, casting his eyes into deeper shadow than usual. "Dismal," he said. "I've had four cancellations.  _Four_ , can you believe it? Not one of them last-minute, either."

"Ah!" Miles nodded sagely. "So you couldn't charge them anyway."

"Exactly," Quark said exasperatedly. "I don't know what the world is coming to. At least when  _you_  didn't show up last week, Doctor, you had the good grace to forget the reservation entirely. I managed to find a customer to fill your slot, and I did very nicely out of the deal."

"You double-booked me," said Julian dryly, translating.

Quark shrugged expansively, using the length of his arms and two upturned palms. "House policy, Doctor. You know that."

Miles looked at his friend in puzzlement. "You forgot a holosuite reservation?"

Julian had the good grace to look uncomfortable as he said; "The  _Defiant_  was deployed with ten minutes' notice. I didn't have time to think about cancelling."

"Never mind," Quark said solicitously, clapping the Doctor companionably on the elbow. "As far as Starfleet Accounting is concerned, you got good value for their money."

" _Quark_!" Miles groaned, irritated more by the reminder that the rest of the senior staff had left him behind while they went after  _his_  baby and  _his…_  well, his good friend and housemate, Major Kira. He still didn't know how to describe the unique relationship he and Keiko had with Nerys these days. "Surrogate" didn't really begin to cover it. She was family now, and no mistake. Miles was a little jealous that Molly had a suitably close-knit word for her, when he didn't. To his daughter, she was Aunt Nerys, which really did just about fit. To himself… he wasn't sure.

"What do you think?" he asked, looking up at Julian and forcing himself to think about something other than how terrified he'd been for the Major's life. "It's been a while since we've defended the bridge. Or we could replay one of your spy stories, if you want."

The Doctor was waiting on a new instalment of the adventures of Julian Bashir, Secret Agent. Felix, the holonovel author and programmer, did incredible work, but he also worked  _incredibly slowly_. Miles felt it was particularly generous to offer to go in for the thriller tonight. Since the incident when his transporter pattern and those of Sisko, Dax, Worf and Kira had been shunted into Julian's program, the younger man had gotten it into his head that Miles made the perfect villain. Falcon, an assassin and international "fixer" with a taste for black leather and ugly automobiles, was a lot of fun to be when Miles was in the mood, but it got a little tiresome playing the bad guy in his friend's fantasy. At least when Miles had taken the plum role in the Battle of Clontarf program, he'd put Julian in as the High King's son and second-in-command.

Then again, maybe that was awkward, too. And given Miles's anger at his friend earlier this week, pitting their wits against each other didn't sound like a good idea. What they  _really_ needed was a program where they could play on the same side, as equals instead of superior and subordinate.

"Or the Battle of Britain," Miles suggested. Perfect.

Julian grimaced reluctantly and shook his head. "I don't think so, not tonight," he said. "I'm not really in the mood."

"Not in the mood?" Quark parroted skeptically. "When aren't you two in the mood for a holosuite? Come on, Chief," he wheedled, nudging Miles with an encouraging elbow. "Not many opportunities left before the baby arrives. You really think Keiko will let you go running off to play whenever you want after there's another kid 'round the place?"

Miles felt a flash of sudden irritation, partly at the hard sell, but mostly at the implication that Keiko — who was one of the most supportive spouses a man could hope for — kept him on a leash, or that staying home with his wife and daughter and much-anticipated newborn son would be some kind of a chore. "Get the darts, Quark," he growled; "and keep your lobes out of my marriage!"

"All right, all right!" Quark held up his hands in surrender and retreated behind the bar. "Darts it is."

Miles stalked down to the far end of the counter, Julian hurrying after him.

"Thanks," he said earnestly, craning his neck as he glanced at the upper level where the holosuites lay. "I'm really just more in the mood for darts today."

"Don't mention it," said Miles. "He's only trying to pad his profits for the day. Darts are fine by me."

Julian grinned at him as Miles plucked the darts from Quark and separated them by colour. "I've been looking forward to this," he said.

What with one thing and another, it  _had_  been almost a month since they'd last had a game. This week, it had been the crisis with Kira's friends. The week before that, the Captain's brain surgery. The week before  _that_ , Julian had been fresh home from his medical conference, too busy playing catch-up in the infirmary to indulge in much of a social life. And prior to that, of course, he'd been at the bloody conference.

"So've I," Miles said, a little more emphatically than he'd meant to. The whisky was starting to make him sentimental. He was going to have to watch that. Letting Julian know he'd missed their games was all right, but he didn't want to let on he'd missed them  _too_  much. "Who's turn is it to throw first?"

"I'm not sure," said Julian.

Miles gaped at him. "You're not sure? You always remember!"

Julian looked decidedly uncomfortable, almost hunted — but only for a moment. Then he shrugged ruefully. "Come on, Miles: it's been weeks since we've had a game!" he laughed. "Don't you think I've had more urgent things on my mind?"

"I s'pose you have, at that," Miles allowed grudgingly. "Go on, then: you can throw first."

"Oh, no," Julian said with that affable amiability he'd been displaying all evening. "I insist: you throw first."

"Can I get you gentlemen anything to drink?" Quark asked, sounding irritated. He'd been watching them like a hawk since Miles had taken the darts, growing increasingly impatient. If they didn't drink, he didn't turn a profit on their presence in the bar.

Miles took pity on him. "You got any more of that whisky you sold Doctor Bashir?" he asked. "I'd take a glass of that."

"Certainly," Quark said, much mollified. "I have a whole case, if you'd like another bottle or two…"

"A glass'll be fine," said Miles. "Julian? I'm buying."

"None for me, thanks," said Julian. He was toeing the foul line and eyeing the dartboard intently, plotting out his strategy like this was the first time he'd ever played this location. "I'm on call tonight."

"You're the Chief Medical Officer," Miles said, rolling his eyes. "Aren't you on call every night?"

"In a sense," said Julian. "But tonight, I'm the  _first_  call if Nurse Buhler needs a hand. As opposed to being the port of last resort in an emergency. Give me a Tarkalean tea, Quark. Extra sweet."

"Coming right up," Quark said, sounding a little disappointed.

"I'll throw you for it," Miles said, coming up beside his friend. It irked him a little that they'd lost their streak of alternating first throws, but he supposed it shouldn't. That was the sort of detail that usually bothered Julian more than it did him. "Closest to the bullseye goes first."

"Fair enough," Julian said cheerfully, flashing another one of those sunny grins. He was a man with a cheerful disposition, but he was especially buoyant tonight. It reminded Miles of the old days, actually, when they were both new to the station and Julian's junior-officer enthusiasm had driven him crazy. "You first."

Miles chuckled ruefully. His friend seemed bent on being gracious tonight, and they could either stand here deferring to each other like a couple of Canadians, or someone could throw the first dart. He squared off at the line and let fly. With a satisfying  _thunk_ , his dart landed right at the base of 20, just above the bullseye.

"There's the one to beat!" Miles said with glee, backing up to the bar where Quark had just laid out the whisky. He took a stiff sip as Julian stepped up.

"Oh, we'll see, Chief," Julian warned cheerfully. And he threw.

The board chirped indignantly as his dart embedded itself in the number 13 — not the wedge for thirteen, but the number itself, on the outer rim of the board. Miles laughed. "Out of bounds! I thought you were the sober one!"

Julian was looking at his hand in puzzlement. He stared at the board for a moment, then studied his fingers again. He moved them in a mime's approximation of his throw, clearly perplexed. "I don't understand…" he muttered. "I took proper aim. I accounted for drag and acceleration due to gravity. I…"

"You're too tense!" Miles advised absentmindedly, reaching for the dish of sandpeas that Quark always kept handy on the bar. "You need to loosen up a little. Maybe you  _do_ need that drink."

"No," Julian said flatly. He shifted his second dart into his hand and let it fly. This time he hit the outer segment of 5.

Miles leaned an elbow on the bar. He really was feeling his liquor now, and it was with great relish that he downed another mouthful of whisky. "Off your game tonight," he observed. "Maybe next time you'll think twice before you blow me off for brain surgery. You're rusty."

"It's a simple principle," Julian said tightly. He was glaring at the board now as he raised his third dart. This one, too, landed unremarkably: across the way in outer 17. It was a little closer to the bullseye, but not much.

"So you've often assured me," said Miles contentedly. His words were slurring a little, and he felt happier than he had in days. This had been an  _excellent_  idea, he decided: a change of scenery, down to the bar for a nice game of darts. He swirled his glass and sipped again. "And yet I'm far and away the better player!"

"Give me those!" Julian strode up to him and plucked Miles's other two darts from his loose fingers. He was back on the line and throwing again almost before Miles was aware his left hand was empty.

"Ooh, hit the 1!" Miles teased. Julian had at least landed in the inner circle this time, so he supposed that was an improvement. But he hadn't seen him throw this badly in… years? Not since they'd still been playing in the cargo bay, Miles thought.

"No…" Julian muttered, still glowering at the board. "It's simply a matter of  _physics_!"

The last word came out forcefully as he flung the sixth dart. There was a musical little chime and the lights around the rim of the board lit up and cycled in celebration. Miles straightened up, impressed. Julian had landed the last dart dead centre, right in the middle of the bullseye.

"There!" Julian cried, turning to his friend with a blazing triumph in his eyes. "I told you it was simple!"

"Sure you did," Miles said lazily, setting down his glass and going to retrieve the darts from the board. He clapped his friend on the shoulder as he went, winking good-naturedly. "But I still get to throw first!"

 _(fade to theme_ )


	48. Indoctrination

**Part IX, Act I: Indoctrination**

They released his arms as they entered the Vorta's office, and left Julian standing in the centre of the room. The cargo crates were gone, and it now looked exactly as it had during Julian's first few visits. He was standing precisely where he had languished on his knees through hours of mind-numbing counting, and Julian could not help but feel a cold, sickening dread of some similar treatment today. He couldn't fathom what Deyos might want to question him about, but he had no doubt why the Vorta wanted to single him out. Julian had witnessed Tiellyn's cavalier disregard for the man's authority. That undermined his power in the eyes of a prisoner, and it could not be allowed.

That the Vorta doctor had apparently given orders that he was not to be harassed for a week after her dispassionate treatment of his injuries was deeply troubling. Julian knew she hadn't done it out of any sense of mercy or altruism; she had some other motive. He could only surmise she wanted her specimen kept intact until she knew whether she required a third set of samples. Or further testing. Or God knew what else. Assuming Deyos was still not allowed to kill him outright, Julian had a feeling there were more nightmares in his future, fuelled by the ghastly possibilities.

He waited for the Jem'Hadar to compel him to kneel, reluctant to show abject submission by doing so without instruction but anxious to lower himself when the time came, rather than being flung down upon a knee that really  _was_  almost healed again. Julian wasn't sure how such an impact would feel in his battered left side, either, but he knew it wouldn't be pleasant. But the Jem'Hadar gave him no orders, and they did not touch him. They stood on either side of him, one point six metres from each shoulder. And they stared with cool hatred.

The wait was excruciating. Julian was lightheaded from the count and wanted very much to sit down on the floor, but he did not dare. When he shifted his feet, trying to distribute his weight more evenly, one of the guards raised his rifle and the other drew his plasma pistol. After that, Julian stayed as still as possible, his back exposed to the door and his eyes on the Vorta's computer pylons.

He told himself he wasn't standing any longer than anyone else. Outside, presumably, the count continued and the other prisoners were all still at attention. But he hadn't even the dubious distraction of listening to Deyos drone on through the numbers, lose his place deliberately, mock one of the exhausted and underfed men, and begin again. There was nothing but Julian's heartbeat to help him track the passage of time, and he found he wasn't focusing on it very well.

From the ache in his legs, he thought he had been standing for about forty minutes when the door finally opened with a whine and a  _clang_  that made his whole body tense with its startle reflex. The Jem'Hadar on his left — one of the younger ones who was never addressed by his hierarchy number — levelled his weapon, and Julian forced himself back to a weary approximation of attention. Deyos came striding around him, looking self-satisfied and confident. Julian suspected the other prisoners had just been through a miserable ordeal, and he hoped none of his patients had faltered badly enough to earn a beating.

"Leave us," Deyos said, waving at the two Jem'Hadar who had been guarding Julian. "Your services are not required."

"But Vorta…" the one on the right protested, looking around uneasily.

"I said you're  _dismissed_ ," Deyos intoned coldly. "If you wish to defy me, I can see that the First has you punished."

"That is not necessary," said the guard. "Obedience brings victory! And victory is life."

They left. Julian couldn't help looking back over his shoulder as the door closed. No other Jem'Hadar had entered with the Vorta. He and Deyos were alone.

"I don't anticipate any trouble from you, human," Deyos said indolently, rounding his desk and keying something into the righthand pylon. "But just in case… if Ikat'ika and his men do not receive my signal every five minutes, they will kill one of your cellmates. I don't know which one, and I don't much care. But if you try to lay a hand on me, they die. Do you understand?"

Julian didn't answer. The Vorta was learning that the most effective means of controlling him was not through threats or violence against his person, but through the menace that his choices might bring harm to others. That couldn't be good; he didn't want Deyos knowing that much about him or the workings of his heart.

The Vorta smiled poisonously. "I asked you a question, human," he said. "Don't believe for a moment that you're immune to suffering if you disobey me, either.  _Do you understand?_ "

"I understand," Julian said tightly. His defiant streak wanted very much to demand to know why he had been brought in here, but his wisdom — a much, much younger part of his personality, really only developed in the years he'd been watching Captain Sisko's example — held him back.

"Good," Deyos spat. He studied something on another of his screens. As if intently focused on that, and only speaking to Julian as an afterthought, he said; "Tell me about Bopak III."

For a moment, Julian could not speak. He couldn't even breathe. He supposed he should have known that the Dominion knew all about his previous (and far briefer) tenure as a prisoner of the Jem'Hadar. They had his service record, after all, and he had filed a report on the subject. If they also had access to his research, they had seen what he had been able to reconstruct of his work on the deserted jungle world.

He knew the Dominion wouldn't have been able to hack into his patient records remotely: he had encrypted them as only a genetically engineered freak could, after the troubling revelation of how easily Enabran Tain had accessed the station's databanks three years ago. The Changeling who had replaced him would not have been able to get into the files until he was physically on the station, using Julian's retinal scan and voiceprints. But he had never bothered to safeguard his research as thoroughly as he had safeguarded his patients' privacy. If they had looked for it, they had found it. And even if they hadn't, his report would have been enough to raise Dominion hackles.

"There's very little to tell," Julian said anyhow. He was under no obligation to bend to interrogation, and Deyos was going to have to try harder than that to get him talking. "I'm sure the Dominion already knows everything it needs to. If they haven't shared it with you, that's not my affair."

Anger blazed briefly in the Vorta's pale eyes. The implication that he was too low-ranking to be fully briefed on his prisoners hadn't been lost on Deyos. That it was accurate certainly fuelled his resentment. Julian wasn't a fool. If Deyos had known about Bopak III before, he would have questioned him about it on one of their previous meetings. He'd learned it from Tiellyn, and had been anxiously waiting out his week until he was allowed to harass the Starfleet officer again.

"It is not a question of what the Dominion knows," said Deyos, rounding the side of the desk and planting himself right in front of Julian. He had to tilt his head back a few degrees to glare into his eyes. His expression soured more profoundly as he realized this. "On your knees," he commanded.

There were no Jem'Hadar in the room to compel him. Julian took a chance. "No," he said with slow deliberation.

His head snapped to the right and his cheek stung ferociously as Deyos slapped him. But Julian had been slapped by better men in states of greater disorientation. He straightened his head again and met the Vorta's eyes.

"I can call back the Jem'Hadar, and they will make you kneel," Deyos said dangerously.

"I'm sure you can," said Julian. "But that will only mean the Jem'Hadar have made me do it, not you."

The Vorta slapped him again, harder this time. " _Kneel_ ," he hissed; "or I will not input the code to send my signal, and one of your friends will die."

By Julian's reckoning, he still had more than two and a half minutes before the next proof of the Vorta's continued good health and magnanimity. He could hold out a little longer before. But there was a chance that even if he did obey later on, Deyos would take his initial resistance as excuse enough to have one of the others executed. Julian thought of Martok, who had survived two years of savage defeats in the ring, clinging valiantly to hope of escape despite the cultural loophole of honourable suicide. He thought of Kalenna, with her courage and ingenuity. He thought of Parvok, saying,  _I do not wish to die here_. He thought of the Breen, incapable of saying anything to him at all.

Slowly but unflinchingly, Julian knelt.

"That's better!" Deyos said crisply. He rapped Julian on the top of the head with balled knuckles. It wasn't painful, but it was hard enough to rattle him, and for an instant Julian was gripped with intense dizziness. It passed with the next blink of his eyes, however, and the Vorta was already moving back behind his desk. "Oh, look at that," he said gleefully. "Two minutes seventeen seconds until the next signal's due. You could have kept your dignity a little longer after all, Doctor."

 _If you think you can take a man's dignity by compelling him to put the needs of others before his own, you've got a lot to learn about humanity_ , Julian thought scornfully, glaring at the Vorta. He wasn't quite reckless enough to say it aloud, not anymore. Three weeks ago, he would have been, and he didn't know whether that should hearten him, or fill him with despair. This place was getting to him. Was it changing him?

Deyos was reaching beneath the desk, drawing out a drawer Julian hadn't realized was there. "Before we get back to your  _fascinating_  story about your adventure on Bopak III," he drawled; "we're going to take care of that mess. If I need to look at your gormless human face for the next couple of hours, we're going to do something about that loathsome fuzz."

This time, Julian recognized the tool and knew what was coming. He wondered if Deyos had already had the sonic razor in his cache of equipment, or if he'd persuaded Tiellyn to leave one behind. It didn't matter. The Vorta tapped the computer console and smiled maliciously.

"There," he said. "Now we have a full five minutes to get you looking less like a monkey and more like a man. How do you humans stand it? It's disgusting."

Julian agreed. Not about beards in general: when it came to facial hair, he was a firm proponent of individual expression. His  _own_  beard, however, was another matter entirely. It was coarse, dense and prickly, still at that indecisive sprouting stage where it felt like a blanket of nettles, each fifty microns across, stabbing him at random intervals. It was unwashed and oily with dead skin and perspiration. He could hear it crinkling whenever he moved his lips. He hated it, and he was powerless to do anything about it. It was the powerlessness, far more than the affront to his vanity, that made him feel so humiliated.

It was equally humiliating to have the Vorta take hold of his jaw and shave him, but at least that was a finite process. Julian closed his eyes, kept his hands fisted at his sides, and endured the indignity. The ends, in this case, did justify the means. If he could have a couple of days when he didn't feel like a Viking thrall, he'd take them.

He couldn't resist the urge to run his palm over his suddenly smooth cheek when Deyos finally released him and stepped back. The Vorta moved back around the desk as Julian tried to brush away the tiny shorn hairs that littered his throat and his collar and the front of his uniform. It was a different itch, no more pleasant than the other but tolerable, at least. He felt exponentially more civilized now, and although he knew it was an illusion, he felt less grimy, too.

"The Vorta don't need to trouble with such things," Deyos mused as he put away the shaver and tapped at his computer. "Another manifestation of the Founders' beneficence. I pity species like yours, who are denied the advantages of genetic engineering."

Julian's insides wrenched, and his throat clamped tight with dread. Deyos couldn't know. Surely he couldn't know. Tiellyn might suspect, but even she had no proof, not yet. There was nothing in his Starfleet or Federation records that would point to the truth. Surely the Dominion, knowing everything else about his life, his identity, and his personality, could not possibly know  _that_. Or could they?

But Deyos was smiling nostalgically to himself as he stroked his own pale, unblemished jaw. "The legend is that we were much like you once," he said. "Primates, primitive and timid and not especially intelligent. But the Founders raised us up, sculpted us into masterpieces of intelligence and authority. They saw in us the potential for greatness, and they created that destiny."

Again, Julian had to channel his sarcastic response into thoughts instead of words.  _They sculpted you, all right: sculpted you into sycophants and slaves to do their bidding_. He had seen the strangle-hold the Founders exerted over the Jem'Hadar, and not only through the addiction to the White. They had a genetic predilection for worship so deeply engrained in their DNA that a Jem'Hadar youth less than two weeks of age, separated from his people while still a neonate and thus deprived of any socialization into his culture, had not only recognized Odo as a Founder, but felt an instinctive need to honour and obey him. Julian did not doubt the Vorta had been endowed with similar compulsions.

"It is a beautiful thing, what the Founders have done for the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar," said Deyos, almost dreamily. Then his expression hardened and his voice grew cold and he spat, "So tell me,  _human_ , why anyone would want to tamper with that gift!"

Julian did not know what to say to this. He kept his eyes on the Vorta as he came out from behind the desk and prowled around him, glaring with such naked hatred that Julian's skin began to crawl. He was careful not to let his discomfort show on his face, tracking Deyos all the way to the left and then turning his head rapidly to the right to pick up the trail as he came around behind. By the time he stood in front of his prisoner again, the Vorta's expression had cooled considerably.

"Perhaps it is untrue?" he said unctuously. "Perhaps Tiellyn has her facts wrong. She always was the careless sort, too eager to have something to lord over the rest of us. You saw for yourself, Doctor: she's an arrogant creature."

"I saw that neither of you care very much for each other," said Julian cautiously. He wondered if there was something in this situation he could turn to his advantage, perhaps even to help him emerge from this room unscathed.

 _Unscathed and in less than two hours_ , another part of his mind added grimly.  _Don't forget about ration call._

It was hardly likely he'd forget. Julian didn't know why his appetite was still so miserably insistent, when he should have started adapting by now, but the constant, grinding hunger was beginning to wear on his spirit much as pain and boredom previously had done. That he seemed to be moving from one intolerable condition to the next as quickly as he conquered them was troubling. If he found a way to cope with his hunger, what would be next?

"It must be frustrating, working so closely with a compatriot who doesn't respect you," he dared, venturing a little further and watching for the Vorta's reaction.

Deyos's eyes widened appreciably. " _Frustrating!_ " he echoed. "The very word, Doctor, yes. She's  _frustrating_."

He took a step back, leaning a hip against the nearest console. He laid a hand on its curved edge, drumming at the metal. "I would certainly prefer a more amicable colleague. But then Vorta doctors are all alike. They think they're superior to the rest of us because the Founders have selected them to advance a unique aspect of their agenda. What they don't realize is that without the rest of us — we who command the warships, who train and lead the Jem'Hadar, and, yes, we who run the prison camps, are the ones who secure the Dominion so that they are free to run their little  _experiments_."

"What kind of experiments?" Julian asked, trying to sound conversational instead of desperate for an answer. He had a vested interest in learning more about that, since he was apparently such an object of interest.

"Who cares about that?" asked Deyos disdainfully. He reached over to the next pylon and inputted his code absentmindedly. "It's not important. But tell me, Doctor.  _Is_ Tiellyn mistaken? She claims you were engaged by a group of rogue Jem'Hadar to do research into rendering Ketracel White obsolete."

Julian considered. He could try to deny it, but he didn't see much point. He could refuse to answer at all, but that would surely just spur Deyos on to try to force the information out of him. He would have done his best to face interrogation bravely if he'd had any secrets to protect here, but he didn't. The Dominion had his service records, so they knew everything Starfleet did about the events on Bopak III. More, because his Changeling replacement had access to his personal logs and even — this thought came with a little slither of nausea — the hand-written journal he kept, as he'd kept since his first year at the Academy. Julian had written extensively about the incident, trying to process it. There were some things he couldn't confide even to his journals; there always had been. But his reflections on Goran'agar and on Miles O'Brien's actions were illuminating enough, even carefully redacted.

There was no sense in martyring himself to hide what had happened on Bopak III, Julian decided. He thought the best thing to do was to string Deyos along until the Vorta got bored. Experience told him that didn't ordinarily take very long. Then again, experience also told him that, bored or not, Deyos had an appetite for cruelty and would willingly grind on in disinterest if he knew he was wearing on his victim. Better, then, to appear untroubled and unaffected himself. And he could also give the Vorta something he clearly wanted very badly.

"If that's what she told you, Tiellyn is mistaken," he said.

Deyos's eyes glittered with avarice. " _Is_  she, now?" he said with relish. "Tell me more."

"Saying I was 'engaged by them' is disingenuous," said Julian. "It makes it sound like I was contracted to perform a service. My crewmate and I were forced into a crash landing, and we were captured by the Jem'Hadar on Bopak III. The First put me to work under threat of death."

Deyos drummed his fingers against the desk again. "Yes, the Jem'Hadar are very good at compelling cooperation under threat of death," he mused. "I prefer subtler means of persuasion." He smiled broadly. "It's working on  _you_ , isn't it?"

Julian saw no reason to dissuade him. If he thought he was getting what he wanted, maybe he wouldn't resort to harsher methods at all. Julian's head was swimming, though, and his thighs were beginning to ache with the effort of kneeling upright. He decided to test Deyos's mood.

"Maybe it is," he said. He began to ease back to sit on his heels, wary and ready to straighten up again at the least sign of danger. But the Vorta was watching his face curiously. Julian went on. "The Jem'Hadar did want to know how to function without Ketracel White. They had a very limited supply."

Deyos wrinkled his nose disdainfully. "They had a limited supply because they had abandoned the authority and the care of their Vorta," he said. "We provide the White to the Jem'Hadar as a reward for their loyal service. If they choose to disdain their benefactors, what do they expect but a painful death?"

Julian didn't give voice to the visceral outrage he felt at this warped perception of the Vorta's role in their subordinates' crippling addiction. Instead, he said; "It did look like it was going to be a very painful death indeed. When I saw Goran'agar's men gathered to receive their ration, they could barely stand because of the agony."

He thought about the Eighth, and how he had suffered without his infusion apparatus before Ikat'ika had given Julian his own tube of White to administer to his man. Julian had believed Goran'agar's commitment to the lives of those under his command had been an idiosyncratic trait: a consequence of no longer relying on the isogenic enzyme. But Ikat'ika was dependent on Ketracel White, and he had still demonstrated unexpected nobility and self-sacrifice. Julian had been so focused on his own role in those events that he hadn't really paused to reflect on the First's.

"Oh, yes, I understand withdrawal from the White is  _exquisitely_  painful," Deyos said airily, as if discussing some innovative art installation instead of the enslavement of an entire sentient race. "I expect that's why the Jem'Hadar are so fond of it."

"They're not  _fond of it_!" Julian snapped. "They're addicted! It's a horrific way to control people, and I don't understand how you can be content to be complicit in the—"

He stopped himself mid-tirade, horrified by his indiscretion. For a moment he was frozen like that, mouth still open around his protest and eyes wide with dismay. Then he clamped his jaw, cast his gaze down at the Vorta's shoes, and waited for Deyos to strike him.

Instead, the Vorta laughed. "Oh, very good, human,  _very_  good," he applauded. "Do please share your Federation outrage at our ways. I very much want to understand what goes on in the mind of a man arrogant enough to think he can undo the work of gods just to serve his own petty sense of right and wrong."

Julian knew he was now glaring at Deyos's feet, but he didn't lift his eyes and he certainly wasn't foolish enough to open his mouth again. The fact was that he had been arrogant — both on Bopak III, trying to cure Goran'agar's men of their addiction, and on the Teplan homeworld when he'd believed he could undermine the Dominion's biogenic plague in a week. In both cases he had dared to believe that he, with his Federation technology and his advanced training, could undo in a matter of days what whole teams of Vorta doctors and geneticists had no doubt toiled to perfect over many years. In the case of the Jem'Hadar, probably over dozens of generations.

And there was more to it than that, of course: something neither Miles on Bopak III nor Jadzia among the Teplans had suspected. Julian's arrogance hadn't sprung from faith in his equipment and his education alone, but from faith in his genetically enhanced brain. In the case of the Blight, he really had believed in his moment of failure and despair that if he with his unnatural advantages could not find the answer, it couldn't be found. And in the case of his work on Goran'agar's blood, Miles had thought that by destroying Julian's equipment and the tricorder and PADD on which he'd been recording his findings, he had destroyed his work as well. But Julian had carried every piece of data he'd gathered out of the jungle with him, and he'd reproduced it faithfully when he'd returned to his Infirmary on Deep Space Nine. Without further samples or even a patient to work with, he hadn't been able to do much with the information — but it hadn't been lost.

Julian hated nothing quite so much as he hated being forced to face what he was capable of, and in his dealings with the Dominion and their brutal eugenics, he'd been forced into that position time and time again.

"No?" said Deyos archly. He shifted his feet, crossing one ankle behind the other. The computer terminal chirped as he entered his code. "Nothing more to say? But how can I convince you of the error of your ways if you won't expound upon your twisted philosophy?"

Julian did look up then, disgusted beyond prudence. "The error of  _my_  ways?" he scoffed. "I'm not the one enslaving thirty people and slowly starving two hundred more!"

Deyos put on a show of affront. "Starving? You exaggerate," he said. "While I'm sure you're a trifle peckish at the moment, you're hardly  _starving_ , Doctor. And anyway, you'll be fed soon enough. If you answer my questions promptly enough to get you out of here for the ration call, that is. And if you don't, well,  _I_  can hardly be held responsible, can I?"

It was on the tip of Julian's tongue to tell him about the Romulans' anemia and the Cardassians' skin lesions and General Martok's ulcerated gums. But he restrained himself. This wasn't the time. If he tried to raise the matter now, Deyos would quite rightly want to know just what he thought was missing from their diet. And while he'd be able to conclusively attest to the lack of copper, the other missing nutrient or nutrients still eluded him. When he couldn't provide an answer, Deyos would have the perfect excuse to dismiss what Julian said. Then there would be no hope of ever resolving the problem. Julian had to play this carefully, and without the necessary information, he could not do anything impulsive.

So he held his tongue while Deyos waited for him to speak again. At length, the Vorta seemed to realize no rejoinder was forthcoming.

"What you fail to understand," he said at last, with the air of a teacher trying to get through to a willfully ignorant delinquent; "is that the Jem'Hadar  _need_  the White. Not just because they've been genetically engineered to require the enzyme, but because the ritual of providing and accepting it gives structure and order to their lives. Have you ever witnessed the ceremony, Doctor?"

Julian knew he was glowering, but couldn't school his features any further.

"I've heard stories," he said tightly. Both Miles and Jadzia had told him about the ritual they'd observed in the  _Defiant's_  mess hall during the strange mission to hunt down a renegade band of Jem'Hadar who had seized control of an Iconian Gateway. It hadn't sounded very inspiring or purpose-giving: just a bored Vorta exhorting a pledge of loyalty from men too wary of being caught late for their dose to do anything but obey. On Bopak III, Goran'agar had not forced his followers into these acrobatics of supplication: he had simply given them what they needed.

"Well!" Deyos seemed pleased. "Perhaps I'll have to make arrangements for you to watch. It only seems fair to round out your education, since you seemed to think it appropriate to take it upon yourself to overturn one of the cornerstones of Jem'Hadar society. You do love to learn, don't you, Doctor?"

By Julian's estimate, the daily dispersement of the Ketracel White occurred about eight or nine hours after the combat in the ring. He fervently hoped Deyos did not intend to keep him here until then. He wasn't feeling as dizzy now that he was sitting back on his calves, but his knees were beginning to hurt and his back was stiff. And of course, there was the matter of the ration call.

"Yes," he said flatly. "I like to learn. I'd be glad to come back this evening to watch."

"Good!" Deyos seemed genuinely pleased. "Good. That's all I ask: that you have an open mind. I'm willing to believe your story, that the fugitive Goran'agar captured you and your friend, and that he forced you to help him against your better judgement. At least, I'm willing to believe it if you make no move to undercut my authority with my own Jem'Hadar. You came dangerously close with that business with Talak'ran, you know. Finding an excuse for the First not to simply execute him was… problematic."

"I didn't try to compromise his need for the White," Julian said carefully. He was on thin ice here, and he knew it. He'd been desperate to keep the Eighth alive. It had been the only way to redeem his own soul after tearing out his infusion port. "I was very clear he needed it."

"That's true," said Deyos, almost solicitously. "You were. And really, it was just as well we didn't have to kill him. Not all Jem'Hadar are suited to internment duty, you know. They get restive. Bloodthirsty. The Eighth is exceptional: in all his bouts in the ring, he has never gone too far and killed a prisoner. It would have been bothersome to break in a replacement."

"Good help is hard to find," said Julian sarcastically.

Deyos's eyes narrowed suspiciously, but he curled his lip in agreement. "Isn't it."

There was something else Julian had been wondering, and now seemed like as good a time as any to try for an answer. "Did you tell Tiellyn you were the one who repaired his jugular vein?" he asked, genuinely curious.

The Vorta laughed. "Oh, dear, have I  _hurt_ you by taking credit for your work?" he asked. "I would have thought by now you'd realize you have no rights here, Doctor. You're worthless. Insignificant. You're even nameless. A Founder has taken your name now, and he's doing great deeds under it for the glory of the Dominion. If I want to claim your handiwork, that's my right, and you should be thankful I allow you to do it at all."

Julian wasn't listening. He had heard nothing after those horrific words:  _A Founder has taken your name now, and he's doing great deeds_. He wondered if the present tense was accurate. Was the Changeling still undetected on the station? He'd begun to understand that Captain Sisko and the others would never be able to find where he had been taken, but surely after three weeks — longer, accounting for the difference in the length of days — they had at least realized he was gone! Surely his replacement wasn't still operating freely on Deep Space Nine. Surely…

Julian knew he was winding up into a panic, and he tried to calm himself. He couldn't do anything to arrest the mad spiral of frantic thoughts, so he focused on his physiological responses. Respirations: too rapid.  _Slow them._  Blood pressure: too high.  _Lower it._  The black spots crackling across his field of vision: unacceptable. _Close your eyes and try to calm down. That's it. Calm down._

Deyos probably had no idea what Julian's replacement had been sent to do, let alone how his mission was faring. If the Founder had been caught, this sycophant on an isolated asteroid would probably be the last to know. Julian couldn't read too much into this Vorta's words, and he definitely shouldn't take the man's choice of tense as grounds for despair.

The Founder who had taken his place had inserted himself into a station full of people who knew Julian, who cared about him and trusted him and came to him with their joys, their triumphs, their travails, their troubles.  _Just think about the people he has to fool_ , he told himself. There was Jadzia, who had eight lifetimes of experience and knew Julian better than almost anyone else in his life. There was Garak, who had been one of the most skilled operatives in the Alpha Quadrant's most secretive Intelligence organization. There was Odo, whose track record on spotting Changeling infiltrators was second to none: not only the one who had replaced General Martok, but one of those on Earth, impersonating Admiral Leyton for an afternoon. And Miles might not be the most observant of people, but his friendship with Julian was deep and unique. It wouldn't be easy to fake. Any one of those four alone would surely be able to spot a counterfeit within a few days.

The uneasy knowledge that Martok's replacement had gone undetected for over a year gnawed at Julian, but as he had done before, he reassured himself that his own situation was different. He wasn't a general surrounded by subordinates who feared him as much as they respected him. He was a doctor. He had daily personal contact with the people around him in the way that the commander of a Klingon warship didn't. There would be no aura of command protecting Julian's replacement.

 _What about General Martok's wife?_ an insidious voice of doubt pressed.  _If she didn't notice the difference, why would any of your friends? It's not as if_ you _have a spouse. You don't even have a lover, not since Leeta finished with you_.

Somehow, Julian's cruelest inner thoughts always sounded like Altovar, the Lethean who had tried to kill him with a telepathic assault just before his thirtieth birthday. Julian didn't know if it was a sign of the lingering emotional trauma, or if the neural pathways in his brain had actually be altered in some physical but medically undetectable way. All he knew was that it was a hideous way to hear his darkest musings, and he had to fight it.

Leeta hadn't "finished with him". She'd been the one to suggest ending their year-long romantic relationship, yes, but the truth was it had just about run its course. They'd had fun together, and nights spent with her had been a balm for Julian's deep-seated loneliness. But he'd always known they weren't meant to spend the rest of their lives together. And maybe he didn't have a lover — but considering the circumstances, that was more of a comfort than a regret right now. Julian didn't know how Martok could bear the idea of his wife coerced into sleeping with a Changeling, completely unaware he was not her husband. He was grateful he didn't have to fear the same violation for Leeta or anyone else. He was grateful even if it meant it might take longer for the truth to come out.

Deyos was snapping his fingers. "Doctor!" he sang lazily. When Julian opened his eyes, blinking bewilderedly, the Vorta smirked. "Dozing off, were you?" he asked. "I would have thought you had all the time for sleep you could possibly want! But then again, you  _have_  been busy, haven't you? Darting in and out of the other barracks whenever you please. Making social calls, I suppose, with your Klingon mastiff at your heels?"

So his house calls hadn't gone unnoticed. Julian chose his words carefully. "I was told the prisoners are free to move around the compound," he said. "I've been bored."

It had the benefit of being true. And it seemed to amuse the Vorta.

"What a pity," said Deyos, dripping insincerity. "I'll have to see what I can do to provide you with more entertainment. Would you like books? Musical instruments? A holosuite, perhaps?"

Julian wasn't going to give this man the satisfaction of responding to his mockery. "If you're finished with me, I'd like to return to my barracks," he said, if not meekly then at least quietly. "I'm sure you're far too busy to waste your whole morning on me."

Deyos raised his eyebrows, alarmingly black against the pallid skin. For an awful moment, Julian thought he had misjudged and that the Vorta was going to condemn him to sit here on his knees until he took root — or fainted from hunger. But he only wafted a bored hand and turned his back.

"Go on," he said dispassionately. "Get out of here. You're tiresome and you must stink atrociously — the Vorta haven't got much of an olfactory sense, but even I can smell you. You really should spend less time cozying up to the Cardassians."

It took Julian a moment to realize he had been dismissed, and another to believe it wasn't a trap. Even as he struggled to his feet, calves half-asleep and head reeling unsteadily with the motion, he expected the Vorta to knock him back down or maybe kick his ankles out from under him. But Deyos was meandering back behind his desk, studying the readouts on his computer while his right hand, independent of his eyes, tapped out the signal code one more time. Julian finally dared to turn his back on the Vorta as he fumbled for the panel that opened the door. It shrieked open, and the two Jem'Hadar at the forcefield turned battle-ready eyes — and rifles — upon him.

"Let him out to join the others," Deyos called briskly, before the doors slid closed to cut him off from his soldiers.

Dazed and not quite able to trust his good fortune, Julian hastened up the corridor towards the relative anonymity of the atrium.

_(fade)_


	49. From Now Until Death

**Part IX, Act II: From Now Until Death**

"Do I smell like a Cardassian?" Julian asked Kalenna that afternoon. He had just returned from his ringside duties: the Romulan chosen to amuse the Jem'Hadar had been taken down by a blow that had broken his nose. Julian had set it as best he could with a quick wrench of the thumbs, and packed the unfortunate man's nostrils with one of his precious sterile pads. Now he was on his knees by his cot, stowing the other supplies he'd brought out with him.

"A little," the Major said. She was on watch at the door, but she let her eyes shift from the narrow, angular window to catch the dismayed expression on Julian's face. She offered him the tiniest flicker of a smile. "I think it's your hair, over your right ear. From pressing your face to Tain's chest when you listen to his heart."

"Oh…" Julian's hand travelled up to the matted curls that covered his temporal bone. He felt irrationally embarrassed, and forced himself to lower his arm. "I'm sorry," he muttered. He had been trying to keep himself as clean as possible, for his own sake and out of consideration for the Major's more sensitive nasal passages. It was an impossible task.

Kalenna's eyes softened for a moment. "It's not your fault," she said. Then she cocked her head to one side, curious. "How is it you're able to hear anything useful?" she asked. "I thought humans had less highly developed hearing than Romulans, and a Romulan doctor would need an ear trumpet to listen to a heart."

Julian fixed his eyes on the dwindling cache of bandages so that she wouldn't see them shift in unease. "I wish I had an ear trumpet," he said. "Or a stethoscope. Or even a glass tumbler. But I haven't got the tools I need, so all I can do is try my best." That hadn't really answered her question, and it didn't provide cover for the fact that he  _could_  hear Tain's heart, even though he shouldn't have been able to. "It's his lungs I'm listening to, really," Julian amended. That was at least a half-truth. "I need to hear his breath sounds, and listen for fluid."

"Ah!" Kalenna nodded, mildly impressed, and turned her attention back to the window. She lapsed into silence, and Julian had finished sorting his sad little hoard of supplies and closed the case that held them when she finally spoke again. Her voice was low and guarded. "Is he dying?"

Julian wanted to give her a frank answer, but he couldn't. Doctor-patient confidentiality demanded discretion, and even if it hadn't, Tain was inside the wall right at this moment. He might not have heard Kalenna's question, but he would surely hear Julian's response. There was no point in stripping away his hope.

"I don't have the right tools to make a real diagnosis," Julian said instead. "There hasn't been as much improvement as I'd hoped to see when the temperature rose. But he's very determined, and often that has a greater impact on outcomes than any other factor."

"He must live, Doctor," said Kalenna, keeping her face turned from him and her eyes fixed resolutely out the window. "We need him."

"I know," Julian murmured, looking down at his hands where they rested in his lap. He'd learned those hands were capable of feats of diagnostics and treatment he never would have imagined he could perform without tools. Just yesterday, he had set the fifth transverse rib of the Cardassian condemned to fight in the arena. For such a fracture to be significantly displaced was unusual; a result of the tremendous savagery of the Jem'Hadar's boots. That Julian had managed to reduce the deformity from without, with neither the aid of a skeletal tractor nor an incision to allow clear access to the bone was something akin to a miracle. But there was a limit to what Julian's hands, however deft, could do, and to Enabran Tain, they were all but useless.

"He is sleeping very little," said Kalenna, pitching her voice into a low, conversational cadence that did little to disguise the dread underlying her words. "Every night for over a week now, he has been wakeful. Wheezing, shifting in his cot. Coughing those sharp, lonely coughs of his. I think the pain is worsening."

Julian shoved the cargo case under his cot with more force than he had meant to. He looked at Kalenna in consternation. "I didn't realize," he breathed. "I found him awake a few nights ago, but he didn't seem in pain. I can't… how could I have slept through that, night after night?"

She looked at him at last, and her eyes were uncommonly warm. "Healing is an exhausting labour," she said. "We have all learned that once you are asleep, it takes a herd of stampeding Dramian bulls to wake you." She hesitated for a moment, looking contemplative. Softly, she added; "Or a nightmare."

Julian's cheeks grew suddenly hot and he cast his eyes away, but before he could apologize yet again for that inconsiderate performance, a dull, metallic  _thump_  sounded inside the far wall.

He was on his feet in an instant, bolting for Tain's cot. Kalenna, eyes widening in sudden wariness, turned back to the window and looked swiftly up and down the hall. "Clear!" she said sharply.

Julian rapped his knuckles on the loose panel. "Hold on, Tain," he said softly. "We're coming."

He seized the foot of the cot, and his whole body went rigid with alarm as someone brushed past him from behind. It was the Breen, who had been sitting almost forgotten on their bunk, silent as always. They moved to take the head of the bed, and together the two of them moved it aside. The Breen flipped back the mattress and handed the prying tool to Julian, who thrust it between the smaller panel and the bulkhead frame. A moment later, his fist was inside the wall, hammering loose the opening to the crawlspace.

Tain came oozing out almost without a pause, clawing at the floor to haul himself forward and wriggling his hips to squeeze his broad body through the small opening. Julian got a hand under each arm and helped the aged Cardassian as he heaved himself to his feet, puffing laboriously with the effort.

"Are you all right? Are you in pain?" Julian asked hurriedly, trying to guide Tain to the nearest bench with one hand while the other reached for his temporal pulse.

The Cardassian pulled back, swatting him away with an irritated hand. "I'm perfectly fine, Doctor: stop your fussing!" he said. "Honestly, you're worse than Mila!"

Julian stepped back, but he watched appraisingly as Tain tugged his tunic down into place, smoothing the uncomfortable bunching in his armpits. He stretched his neck, first to the right and then to the left, and ran an admittedly steady hand through his silvery hair.

"You've only been in there a few hours," Julian said, laying out the aberration as if talking his way through a differential diagnosis — or one of the holosuite mysteries he loved. "You don't usually take a break this early in the afternoon. If you're not in pain—"

"I'm an old man," Tain chuckled, clapping Julian on the shoulder forcefully enough to awaken a twinge in his healing ribs. "I can't hold my water like I used to, that's all. Just you wait, Doctor: your turn will come. Now, if you don't mind, we've got a highly suspect mess in this room right now, and I'd rather not be the one to clean it up."

Julian's gaze slid guiltily to the gaping wall panel, and he bent to move the tritanium sheeting back into place. Tain meandered over to the door and leaned against it, smiling at Kalenna.

"You needn't trouble yourself about me, my dear," he said consolingly. "I intend to live for decades more, but in any case I don't believe I have more than a week's work to do on the transmitter. I've got the first quarter of the identification code wired in already. Slow work, I'll admit. I never imagined how I could miss a simple number pad."

"You heard us," said Kalenna calmly.

Tain laughed. "Every word. I'm old, my dear, not deaf."

"Good," Kalenna said, her tone clipped and a little bit tart. "If you heard us, perhaps you will cooperate the next time Doctor Bashir wishes to check your pulse."

"Ooh! That will teach me to rebuff the good doctor's advances," Tain mocked. His hand shot out, fingers sliding into her hair and thumb settling on her temple. Kalenna stiffened but did not pull back. "Pleasant, is it, having someone dive for your head like that?"

"He's trying to help you," Kalenna said. She took Tain's wrist and forced his hand down and away from her.

Julian and the Breen slid the cot back into place. "All's well," Julian said pointedly, fixing his eyes on Tain. "If you need to go relieve yourself, it's safe to open the door."

"Splendid!" Tain chuckled. He wrested his arm from Kalenna and kept piercing eyes upon her as he reached unseeing for the panel and slapped it. The door opened with its usual teeth-rattling furor. Tain gave the Major one last toothy smile before sauntering out into the corridor.

The door slid closed, and Kalenna leaned back against it, brushing the tips of her fingers to her temple as if she could wipe away Tain's touch.

"I'm sorry…" Julian began.

"Who is Mila?" asked Kalenna at almost the same moment.

She was an agent of the Tal Shiar, and she appreciated information almost as much as the man who had just left the room. Julian was pleased to be able to satisfy her in this respect.

"His housekeeper," he said. "She's been his loyal servant for decades. I understand he left her amply provided for in his will."

Garak had made sure of that. He did not often confide in Julian about his covert communications with his homeland, but he'd been inordinately invested in Mila's situation. Over the course of almost two weeks following his rescue from the wreckage of the joint fleet, he'd seemed incapable of thinking (or talking) of anything else. Julian had been almost intolerably curious about Garak's obvious affinity for this aged Cardassian lady, but he had known better than to press the matter too far.

"His housekeeper," Kalenna repeated, pensive.

"Does it translate properly?" asked Julian. "For humans,  _housekeeper_  has a certain connotation beyond 'a person employed as a domestic manager'. I'm fairly certain that's the case for Enabran Tain, too."

"You mean that she keeps his bed, as well as his kitchen," Kalenna said bluntly.

Julian nodded, but felt the need to qualify that suggestion. "I have no proof of that, of course. It's only…"

"No, I agree with your assessment," said Kalenna. "He has invoked her name before, and he speaks of her more like a spouse than a servant. I am pleased to have that hypothesis confirmed. It is… reassuring to know he is mortal enough for that."

"I suppose it is," Julian sighed. He sank down onto the table. The Breen was already back on their cot, gloved hands resting on padded thighs.

Kalenna watched him for a moment. "Have you a spouse to return to, Doctor?" she asked quietly. She had left the door now, and she was standing near the end of the other bench. She seemed to be weighing something in her heart, as if unsure whether to speak.

Julian shook his head. "I was in a romantic relationship until about four months ago," he said. "It wasn't meant to be." He shifted uncomfortably. "Major… what Sub-Commander Darok said to you, about having no one to miss you. I wanted to say I understand what a noxious thing that was to say. Just because we don't have families doesn't mean there's no one to care if we're gone."

Kalenna's face furrowed quizzically, and she opened her mouth to speak. Then she seemed to think better of it. With a cautious glance back at the door, she sat down. "Sub-Commander Darok left behind an ornamental wife and four children in their teens, who are now likely subsisting on a widow's pension," she said. "I expect he thinks of little else, and envies those he perceives as being free of such a burden of guilt. His words did not wound me, Doctor. I am sorry if they wounded you."

They had, and not only on her behalf, but Julian shrugged and tried to smile. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Humans have tried for centuries to overcome the idea that a husband, a wife, and their biological children form a family somehow more valuable than any other kind. We still haven't entirely succeeded, though we've made a lot of progress."

"On Romulus, we consider that honouring the biological imperative," said Kalenna. "Other kinds of families are accepted, but not honoured in the same way. But for an operative of the Tal Shiar, even a fruitful marriage is discouraged. It is a weakness, and it can be exploited not only by our enemies, but by our superiors."

Once upon a time, Julian had gone through his own process of discernment regarding whether it was fair to ask anyone to marry a Starfleet officer. In the end, the question had been settled for him far more definitively than he could have done on his own. But he remembered the quandary well.

"I know what it's like to feel you have to choose between your career and a domestic life," he said, staring down at his boots. The toes were scuffed, greyish scratches etched across a surface that should have been a glossy, perfect black. It was a disgraceful state for an officer's boots to be in, and he wondered what his drill instructor back at the Academy would have said to see it.

Kalenna said nothing. She was radiating unease, and Julian had the feeling she wanted very much to say something more. When she spoke at last, however, it was to change the subject.

"Your dream, five nights ago," she said. "What did you dream of? It must have been horrifying."

Julian looked up at her in surprise, unsure what to say. "I…" he began. He felt the familiar flush of embarrassment. "I'm sorry I screamed," he muttered. "I'll try not to do it again."

"It isn't that," said Kalenna. "There isn't one among us who hasn't awakened screaming in the night in this place. Not even them." She nodded at the Breen. "At least, I think it was a scream. It sounded more like a catastrophic comlink failure. No. What troubles me is that you seemed grateful to wake  _here_. 'Thank God,' you said, when you saw where you were. That is a human expression of relief, is it not?"

"Yes," Julian admitted quietly. He couldn't meet her eyes.

"To find it a mercy to awaken in this place…" Kalenna murmured. "I cannot imagine a dream so dreadful."

"I'd rather not talk about it," Julian said. He hadn't even tried to disentangle the complex layers of psychological torment his mind had put him through, at least no farther than he had in his last moments before waking. It was easier just to blame all of it on the breaking fever, and to try to move on with his daily life.

"Very well," said Kalenna. There was another long silence. Then she ventured, very quietly; "I can see the strain you are under, Doctor. The first month is the bitterest for most of us. All of us but General Martok, I think: for him, it never grows easier to bear. But great men have been broken by their first weeks in this place. I do not wish to see another fall."

Julian forced himself to sit up straight and to meet her gaze with what he hoped were clear, hopeful eyes. There was a weight in his heart he could not shift, but a deep, cleansing breath at least provided a moment's illusion of hope. "No fear of that," he said effortfully. "I may be bruised, but I'm not beaten. Besides, if there's any truth to Tain's estimates, I won't have a second month in this place."

Kalenna smiled, a rare, unguarded expression. She shook her head in wonder. "Federation optimism," she said, and she did not say it with scorn.

 _(fade_ )

The Jem'Hadar came for him without preamble. The five sentinels of Barracks 6 were strewn around the room, with nothing much to do but wait out the interminable hours until curfew, when Parvok took a startled step back from the door.

"Guards!" he gasped, eyes widening with dread.

"Get into the corner," Kalenna said calmly. She looked around the room, from her frightened subordinate to General Martok, working laboriously through his physical therapy exercises for his now worryingly compromised elbow, to Julian, who was sitting on Enabran Tain's cot. "We knew they were coming. We have nothing to hide."

Julian knocked on the wall once, surreptitiously, and then rose to his feet as the door shrieked open. The Second came in, leading two others with rifles at the ready. When he had told the others that he was going to be taken to witness the Ketracel White ceremony, they had discussed whether he should position himself out in the atrium when it was time for them to fetch him. Martok had liked the idea: the farther they could keep the guards from Tain's hidden bolt-hole, the better. Kalenna disagreed. Julian didn't routinely wander the yard: he had been in no physical condition for exercise during most of his stay, and even now that he was stronger he rarely went out without a purpose. It would be too suspicious if he meandered the atrium tonight: it would look like he was deliberately trying to keep the guards away from the barracks.

Julian's own opinion had settled the matter, with Martok determined to respect his judgement in this. What he hadn't told the others was that there was more than one way to distract a guard, and distance wasn't really needed.

So he looked at the Second with his very best Haughty Englishman face. "About time you got here," he said with just the right amount of bluster. "I was beginning to think your Vorta doesn't keep his promises."

He thought they would grab him. He didn't expect the blow. The back of the Second's hand blasted into the side of Julian's face, and he lost his balance, stumbling to the left. His knee hit the side of the middle cot, and he thrust out his palm to catch himself against the wall before he could fall. He heard the hollow  _bong_  against the bulkhead, and he was frantically grateful he'd stepped far enough into the middle of the room that he hadn't hit Tain's bed instead. He didn't know if the force of such an impact was enough to make the loose panels shift, but he was damned glad they didn't have to find out.

A strong hand braced his hip, and another cupped his elbow. The Breen, twisted where they sat, helped him to right himself. Julian had only a moment to stand there, swaying dizzily and trying to blink away the artefact of the blow, before a scaly fist closed on his arm and thrust him towards the door.

"Move!" snapped the Second. "If it were up to me, human, you would be going to your death now instead of to observe our ways! Do not tempt me to disobey my orders!"

Julian couldn't really see properly, but he turned his head towards the dark mass that could only be General Martok. Tightly, he shook his head, willing his loyal protector to be still. The other guards were taking his arms, none too gently, and as the door squawked open he was hustled out into the corridor.

His vision cleared as he was marched swiftly down the length of the atrium, and the first thing he noticed was that the usual posts were vacant. All of the Jem'Hadar were assembled at the far end, just outside the door to the administration pod. Julian wondered why they didn't wait to perform this ritual after curfew, when all of the prisoners were locked away for the night. Then he realized they probably didn't have to. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would know to stay under shelter during the last hour before the White was distributed, when the Jem'Hadar were at the end of their vials and beginning to get a little punchy. Julian's jaw ached at that thought where the Second had struck him, and he saw no prisoners at all as he was led to the knot of waiting guards.

The Second shoved his men aside, clearing a path so that Julian could be herded right to the front. Baring his teeth in loathing, the Second seized Julian's collar and yanked him from the hands of the other two Jem'Hadar. "On your knees!" he barked, flinging Julian against the wall of the pod.

Julian's shoulder struck the bulkhead with sundering force, and his opposite palm slapped the cold metal to steady himself. With an effort, still unaccustomed to such rough handling even after weeks in this place, he straightened up and gulped in a breath to replace the one that had been driven from his lungs, and he eased himself down onto the ground.

"See how the human grovels," the Second said contemptuously, raising his voice so that the whole assembly could hear. "He fears us. He knows that what he is about to witness is the fulcrum that will crack his world! Victory is life!"

"Victory is life!" the assembled soldiers roared. The sound of twenty-eight voices — Julian did another quick scan of the crowd and confirmed his instinctive count: twenty-eight — raised in that fearsome salute was simultaneously daunting and almost deafening. Julian couldn't help cringing, tucking his head and lifting his shoulders as if he could belatedly protect his ears. But he forced himself to settle and to straighten as soon as the reflex released him.

He didn't dare to move his head, but he shifted his eyes far up and to the right to watch the Second. He never would have imagined the brutal soldier had a poetic streak, but  _the fulcrum that will crack his world_  was actually quite a remarkable bit of imagery.

He heard a muffled crackle of static electricity that was followed almost immediately by the  _clang_  of the pod door. Deyos stepped out, First Ikat'ika half a step behind. Behind him marched Fourth Tiratak'nar, carrying a box that reminded Julian of nothing so much as an ancient Roman chair rendered in one-quarter scale. It had long, widely-spread handles and four stubby feet.

The Vorta surveyed the assembled platoon. He smiled coldly. "As you can see, we have a guest this evening," he said. "The human tells me he has never beheld your daily profession of loyalty. I thought he would find it illuminating."

Now that the Second was watching his leader, Julian dared to turn his head just far enough that he could watch the faces of the Jem'Hadar. Once, they had all looked very much alike to him — minor differences in the configuration of their facial spikes the only noticeable variation. Now, he could pick out familiar faces. He saw the young trainee whose neck he had treated on the day Ikat'ika had struck the bargain and given him the bandages and disinfectant. He saw Verat'elar, with whom he'd spent a nimble twenty-three minutes in the ring. And of course there was Eighth Talak-ran. Where all the other Jem'Hadar were watching the Vorta and the Fourth with the case of Ketracel White, the Eighth was glowering at Julian with an intensity that chilled his blood.

Deyos stepped to the side, casting a cool look at the nearest Jem'hadar. They stepped back. The Vorta nodded to the First.

Ikat'ika stepped forward, proud and solemn. He indicated Tiratak'nar and the box. "It is time," he said with ritual gravity.

Deyos's expression was positively radiant as he asked, with an air of equal zealotry quite unlike what Jadzia had described witnessing on board the  _Defiant_ , "First Ikat'ika, can you vouch for the loyalty of your men?"

Ikat'ika seemed to stand a little taller at these words, something Julian would not have thought possible. The Jem'Hadar maintained incredibly rigid posture as a matter of routine. "We pledge our loyalty to the Founders," he proclaimed; "from now until death."

With an air of benevolence that reminded Julian uncannily of Vedek Tonsa blessing the Bajoran children on the second day of the Gratitude festival, Deyos said; "Then receive this reward from the Founders. May it keep you strong."

He laid his palm on the lid of the box. "Unlock," he said. The lid retracted, and he removed a fistful of vials. He gave them to Ikat'ika, who passed all six off to his Second. The Second took one, and handed the rest to the Third, who set about distributing all but the one he inserted into his infusion device. By then, Ikat'ika had another handful. This, too, he passed off to the next man in the hierarchy. The hand-off was repeated four more times. When he gave the last four vials to Verat'elar to hand out to the lowliest trainees, Ikat-Ika retained two. He still had not applied one to his own shoulder. He beckoned a freshly-dosed Jem'Hadar forward to take the box from the Fourth. He gave one of the last two vials to Tiratak'nar and watched as he inserted it. The sporadic trickle of White through the neck tube was replaced by a steady stream, and Tiratak'nar closed his eyes in momentary bliss.

Then, at last, Ikat'ika raised the last vial to his own device, and slid it into place. Deyos was apparently bored with the proceedings. He waved to the Jem'Hadar holding the box, which had sealed itself when the last batch of the drug was withdrawn. "Put it away," the Vorta said. He eyed the throng. "The rest of you, back to your duties. Dismissed!"

They dispersed with military precision; all but the First and the Second. Ikat'ika was clearly waiting for something. The Second seemed to want to glare down at Julian.

Deyos looked at him as well, eyebrows raised. "Well?" he asked. "What do you think?"

What Julian thought was that the most interesting part of the entire procedure was the fact that Ikat'ika had waited until the last of his men had his dose before taking his own. He could not help but remember Goran'agar, and his investment in the welfare of those under his command. Was it possible Ikat'ika shared the gene mutation that made him less reliant on the drug, and so also less brutally minded and violent? Or was it something else? Julian had not asked Goran'agar's age, but he knew Ikat'ika was eighteen — an Honoured Elder.

But Deyos was waiting for an answer, and Julian couldn't give that one.

"Very enlightening," he said instead, tightly. "Thank you for letting me witness it."

"Now do you see?" Deyos said. "The beauty of the Founders' plan? The elegance of their design? The men renew their vow to the Dominion every day, and every day they are justly rewarded for their fidelity. Everyone needs rituals and traditions, Doctor. Even the Jem'Hadar."

 _Especially the Jem'Hadar_ , Julian thought, but he didn't say it. He could understand the propensity for the enemies of the Dominion to overlook the sentience and the emotional needs of this ruthless and in many ways homogenous enemy. He didn't like it when Starfleet Command talked about the Jem'Hadar like a collective no more differentiated than the Borg, but he knew why they did it. To see a Vorta, who had contact with these men every day and was supposedly trained to be their shepherd and commander, falling into the same fallacy was profoundly disturbing. Julian was familiar with the concept of denying a people's fundamental identity and individuation in order to enslave them. He'd worked with survivors of an Occupation that had tried to do just that. He'd even had a taste of what it was like to be looked at with such utter contempt and treated like a slave. But that made it no less sickening to witness.

"You can see the pride it brings them," Deyos went on, clearly carried away with his own paean. "So tell me, Doctor _."_ He shifted from rapture to disgust, and leaned in so that they were nose to nose. Grabbing a fistful of Julian's uniform, he whispered in a voice that clearly only the human was meant to hear; "What kind of  _monster_  would want to take that away from them?"

He didn't wait for an answer. He released his hold as if Julian were some clump of swamp-weed pulled out of a pool of sludge, straightened his back, and strode for the door. As it opened, he cast back over his shoulder; "Enjoy yourself, Second. But if he dies,  _you_ will be held accountable to Tiellyn."

Julian's head snapped to the left at those words, watching as the Vorta strolled up towards the force-field, once more manned by two armed guards. The door slammed shut, cutting off his view and making him jump. And the Second's coarse hand closed on his shoulder.

"I have been waiting for this," he hissed, hauling Julian to his feet.

The doctor felt a cold wave of fear drenching him. His knees felt weak, and he might have fallen but for the iron grip on his arm. He knew there was terror in his eyes as he looked at the Second's face. The man had not wanted to let him live to leave the arena. He had been watching him ever since with a predatory eye. Deyos may have laid a prohibition on actually killing him, but Julian could imagine a vast universe of possibilities for torture and anguish that lay between where he stood now, still recovering from the Second's last pass at his frail human body, and the release of death.

"No one takes the port of a Jem'Hadar soldier!" the Second snarled. His breath was acrid with the chalky scent of the Ketracel. "It is an outrage. A violation. You will pay."

"Not today."

It took Julian a muddled moment to realize the words had actually reached his brain by way of his ears, and not sprung out of some delirious imagining of the kind of pithy last-moment interjections that were so easy to make in Felix's secret agent holoprograms. The Second had him by the right shoulder, but now Ikat'ika was standing squarely perpendicular to his left and almost near enough that their sleeves could brush. He was glaring sternly at his second-in-command.

" _What?_ " the Second snapped, breaking eye contact with Julian so that he could glower at the First. "The Vorta said—"

"The Vorta may permit diversions that I have forbidden," said Ikat'ika. "That does not make them any less forbidden. Unhand the human and return to your post."

The Second's face contorted horribly. He seemed about to back down, but then his expression hardened and his grip on Julian's arm tightened. His fingers were digging painfully into the ball of the joint, and Julian felt his coracoacromial ligament slide sickeningly out of the way of the probing digits. He felt a sudden swell of dizziness.

" _No_." The Second enunciated the word with blackest resolve.

Ikat'ika's head twitched to one side, almost like an android's might have done. "You are Second. I am First," he said. "You do not have the privilege of saying 'no' to me."

"The Vorta wishes to see the human suffer," snarled the Second. "He has given me an order—"

"He gave you only one order: that the prisoner should not be killed," Ikat'ika countered. "The rest was merely an… invitation. I am rescinding it. Unhand him and return to your duties."

The Second's face furrowed into deep clefts of rage. "And if I do not?" he challenged.

"Then tomorrow at the count, the Third will be the Second," said Ikat'ika. "And when the supply ship comes in one week's time, they can deliver us a new trainee, for the glory of the Dominion."

Still the hold on Julian's arm only tightened, and the Second's resolve did not waver.

Ikat'ika's voice remained cold and unyielding, but he dropped the volume almost to a murmur. "Boran'itrex," he said dangerously; "you have served under me since I was a Twelfth. You know better than to test me when I give a command."

The Second's face contorted horribly, but Julian's view of it faded to hazy grey as the hand clamped tighter still, and a bone-deep bolt of pain shot into his shoulder joint and his chest. His lips parted, but by some miracle he managed to keep silent. He had a feeling that if he made any sound at all, anything to remind the Jem'Hadar soldier that he was real, present and alive, he would break the First's tenuous hold on Boran'itrex's attention, and the Second would turn on him like a wild beast.

Then suddenly the pressure released. Julian crashed to his knees, clutching at his shoulder and gasping raggedly. A hard boot blasted into his abdomen just under his ribs and he crumpled, wheezing. Distantly, over the roar of the flood waters trying to sweep him off into unconsciousness, he heard the sharp ringing of hard boots on stone composite as the Second marched away.

Ikat'ika's legs were black pillars at his side, the only thing Julian could pick out of the fog that eclipsed his sight. He struggled to master himself, his clinical instincts telling him to explore the joint for damage, but the pain was almost as all-consuming as the struggle to draw breath.

Finally, he managed an inadequate but coordinated gulp of air that filled his starving lungs, and after that it was suddenly much easier to think. The Second's foot had caught him in the celiac plexus, and now that Julian understood that, his panic began to fade. He sawed in another breath and wriggled the fingers of his right hand. His shoulder was still throbbing under his clutching left palm, but it wasn't dislocated. Slowly, he eased back on his heels, still curled over his lap.

"On your feet, and come with me," Ikat'ika said dispassionately, when at last Julian tried to raise his head. He stared up at the First, his eyes wide and confused. He didn't understand why Ikat'ika would take his part, or spare him from the tender ministrations of his outraged Second, but Julian was beginning to learn that in this camp, there was no such thing as a lucky escape. Ikat'ika regarded him disdainfully. "On your  _feet_ ," he repeated. "There is work for you to do."

Though his legs were unsteady and he could not quite bear to let go of his shoulder, Julian struggled to obey. When he faltered, one foot on the floor and the other knee rising, Ikat'ika took him by the left elbow and hauled him the rest of the way up. Then he led him, roughly but not brutally, around the side of the administration pod towards the back perimeter of the dome. Towards a part of the prison Julian had never seen before.

 _(fade_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**transverse rib (exo.):** In Cardassians, one of the external set of ribs that travel across the internal ribs at approximately a 45-degree angle. Prone to breaking under blunt force trauma. (Ep. 4.01, "The Way of the Warrior")

 **skeletal tractor (tech.):** A small device capable of generating a transdermal tractor beam to move broken bones for realignment.

 **coracoacromial ligament:** One of the ligaments of the rotator cuff in the human shoulder.


	50. Subversive Rights

**Part IX, Act III: Subversive Rights**

At first, Julian saw only the wall of the dome, segments bolted together with larger versions of the rivets that held the bulkhead plates inside the barracks. Then as Ikat'ika hustled him around the back of the administration pod, he saw the airlock. It was large: a modular tritanium mass four metres across. Unlike those on DS9, with their circular shape and cogwheel doors, this one was square. There was a smaller door in it, too — a curious design, and one that made Julian uneasy because it presented a potential weakness in the seal. His instinct was to hang back, even though that was absurd: if a flaw in the airlock caused a breach of the dome, no one within would have a fighting chance at survival whether they were standing next to the exit or tucked up in their barracks on the far side of the atrium. But Ikat'ika compelled him forward, moving with purpose to the control panel in the frame of the larger door. He tapped three of the Dominion glyphs, and the smaller door slid open, retracting inside of the larger.

There was a cold draft as the seal was broken: the corridor of the airlock had a positive pressure differential. Julian was hauled over the threshold before he could take in anything more about the vaulted tubular passage, and a moment later the door closed behind them, cutting them off from the rest of the dome.

The airlock was about thirty metres long, terminating in a blast door made to the same dimensions as the one at their back. Julian was disappointed to see it was solid metal, without windows. He would have liked a glimpse of the stars. He supposed he was also spared the sight of the barren rock of the asteroid, but he couldn't really bring himself to believe he would have minded that. He missed the stars. They were impossible to see through the scratched and discoloured windows set high in the dome behind: all that he could make out through them was the vague blackness of space.

Four doors of the standard size and design opened off the airlock, two on each wall. Julian eyed them uneasily. That was an unconventional design, and he didn't trust it. Whatever this area of the prison was meant for, it clearly wasn't a very secure environment. He felt very exposed here, with only that towering door between him and the vacuum without. It was an irrational fear, especially for a man accustomed to life on a space station, but that made it no less real.

It was much colder in this corridor than it was in the dome. Julian thought it might be even colder than the atrium had been during orbital night. Evidently the Vorta saw little purpose lavishing life support resources on this section of the prison. As Ikat'ika compelled him past the first pair of doors, Julian stole a glance through the windows of the one on his right. Stacks of packing containers were lined up in a precise grid within. It seemed he had found the cargo bays.

The second door on the left was the one Ikat'ika wanted. He smacked the panel to open it, and again there was a hiss as the pressure between the two spaces equalized. At least Julian knew now that the auxiliary rooms were airtight. Logic demanded they would have to be, but all the same, it was good to have proof.

In this room there were more crates, two long steel tables, and a knee-high cubic block with a Dominion computer pylon bolted to the floor beside it. On the block sat an enormous cylindrical drum. A long pipe-handle protruded from its top, which fell just below elbow height. Overhead was a suspended nozzle connected to a pipe that ran into the far corner, where two huge cisterns occupied the back wall. Another pipe ran along the right-hand wall, over hanging a trough. Several spigots, alarmingly low-tech, protruded from it. There were seepage stains on the wall behind each one. Parallel to the trough, positioned so that a person standing in the gap between could reach both it and the spigots with ease, stood another table. In neat ranks of nine, battered metal canteens awaited filling.

Julian had been brought to the prison kitchen.

At first he thought the place was deserted. The door slammed shut, and Ikat'ika looked around as if appraising an unfamiliar battlefield.

"Arat'zuma!" he barked. "Present yourself."

From behind the double row of cargo containers, stacked three high, another Jem'Hadar appeared. Julian recognized him as the one who routinely dished up the prisoners' mush at ration call. He looked skittish and wary, and Julian's first thought was to check the tube running between his breastplate and his throat. The Ketracel White was flowing smoothly, with only a few small pockets of vacuum appearing like tiny bubbles in the line. He had received his new vial.

Ikat'ika released Julian's arm and gave him a cursory shove between the shoulder-blades. He lurched forward awkwardly, looking back in perplexity. The First was glaring at him coldly.

"Attend him," he commanded. To his subordinate, he said; "Show the human your injury."

Arat'zuma did not seem very happy with this idea, but neither could he disobey his First. Reluctantly but without delay, he raised his left arm, holding out his hand for Julian to see.

Four of the fingers were crooked, deformed in some places near the joint, and in others squarely in the middle of a phalangeal bone. The palm was worryingly crimped, and the whole appendage was swollen. Julian forgot his unease and the fact that he was standing between two of his captors. He hurried to the man's side and took hold of his forearm, supporting it with his left hand while his right moved to hover just above the battered knuckles.

"What happened?" he asked, guiding his patient a half-step to the left so that the grid of uneven grey lighting fell more advantageously on the affected area. The hand had obviously been crushed, and at least a couple of hours ago at that. There was already extensive bruising, and the few intact knuckles were badly inflamed.

Arat'zuma looked sharply up at Ikat'ika. It was the First who answered, sternly. "That is not your concern, human. We had an agreement. You will ask no questions. You will treat this man."

"Of course I'll treat this man," Julian said, imprudently exasperated. He didn't need to be commanded to do what any ethical physician would feel compelled to do. "But asking questions is part of a medical examination. If I don't know what happened, I can't know how best to help him."

"You will help him by repairing his hand," said Ikat'ika coldly. "The cause of the injury is irrelevant."

Julian tore his eyes from the crumpled digits to glare at the First, opening his mouth to retort. Ikat'ika's expression stopped him. He did not look like a concerned commander or a patient's next-of-kin. He looked like an executioner waiting for an excuse to kick the platform out from under the condemned man in the noose. His eyes were those of a killer, and Julian was the only person in the room he might feel compelled to kill.

His courage flagged a little, and he lost the will to argue. "Can you at least tell me," he said more respectfully; "if I'm looking at a combat injury, or some kind of accident?"

The two Jem'Hadar exchanged an eloquent but alien look. They clearly understood one another, but even with his highly attuned perception and unnaturally keen eyes, Julian couldn't interpret what passed between them. When at last Arat'zuma spoke, it was with the reticence of a teenager admitting to adventurous sexual activity.

"It is not a combat injury," he muttered.

Ikat'ika made a noise of disgust, and took three broad strides nearer. "Examine him!" he barked at Julian. "Is the hand broken?"

It was broken, all right. Julian just couldn't venture a guess as to how many times. "I need an imaging scanner to identify the fractures," he said. "If I try to palpate for them, he'll be in agony."

"I have no scanner," said Ikat'ika. "Use your hands, as you do with the prisoners."

"I don't do that by choice," Julian said tightly. "It's very painful for them, and it's considerably less precise. There are thirty-two bones in the Jem'Hadar hand. If I start digging around with my thumbs—"

"The Jem'Hadar do not feel pain," Arat'zuma barked crisply. "The Vorta has said so on many occasions."

Julian looked at him, pity and disgust warring within him. One was directed at the patient before him, and the other at Deyos. Still, he knew both were showing in his eyes and filtering into his voice as he looked at the guard and said quietly; "You know that's not true."

"Why do you think we waited until the fresh allotment of White, human?" asked Ikat'ika contemptuously. "He is more resilient to pain now than at any other time in a day. Now do it, or you are of no use to me."

The underlying threat there was clear. Julian had been spared the attention of the Second because Ikat'ika had work for him. If he refused to do that work, there was no reason not to turn him over after all.

It was an effective threat, but it was also unnecessary. Julian had to help this Jem'Hadar, and not only because he was in pain. If he didn't find a way to keep the man on his feet and functioning as a competent part of his unit, Julian knew Arat'zuma would be executed. It was not only the Jem'Hadar philosophy, but seemed to be something Deyos found satisfaction in doing. That was Julian's guess, anyhow. It would explain why the First was so reluctant to go to the Vorta with his men's injuries, even though the Vorta presumably kept a medkit for precisely such reasons. This was not a serious injury: with a basic level of competence and the proper tools, it could be put right in under an hour. But if Deyos was not inclined to provide the latter and did not have the former (which Julian was beginning to suspect was the case), his scorn for the lives in his custody might well make execution seem the preferable option. Weighed against that, the pain of palpation was a less horrifying alternative.

"He should at least sit down," said Julian. "He needs to be still while I do it, or we'll do more damage." He looked around, but there were no benches or stools. The tables might work in a pinch, but they were much taller than the ones in the barracks, and he didn't much want to make the man with the broken hand climb them.

Ikat'ika seemed to know what he was thinking. He marched to the wall of crates, and hauled one down from the top row. It was clearly heavy, evident from the speed of its descent and from the loud  _thunk_  as it hit the floor, but Ikat'ika moved it effortlessly. He stepped back like a soldier on parade, and nodded curtly at the box. "Sit," he said sternly.

Arat'zuma obeyed, Julian withdrawing his hands carefully to allow him to do so. Like the young one who had been bitten by Amcet, he didn't seem to know quite  _how_  to sit. He moved as if executing a series of movements from a schematic, stiffly and warily. Once he was down, however, he clearly felt some relief. He shifted into a more comfortable stance, legs broadly spraddled, and looked up at his First for approval.

Ikat'ika grunted noncommittally, and took up a sentry's pose between his subordinate and the door. "Be quick," he said to Julian. "There is less than one hour until curfew."

Julian nodded once, but he was already positioning himself beside his patient. "This is going to hurt," he said. "If you need to scream, that's all right. I wish I had something to give you for the—"

"Do not coddle me, human," said Arat'zuma scornfully. "The White is all I need, and the Jem'Hadar do not 'scream'. In combat we have been known to roar to strike terror into the hearts of our enemies, but that is all."

Julian couldn't help a shadow of irony as he said, "Well, if you need to  _roar_ , then, go ahead and strike terror into my heart."

That earned him a look of utmost loathing, but the guard did not resist as Julian stabilized his forearm, took hold of his hand near the base of his thumb, and began his examination.

 _(fade_ )

Arat'zuma did not roar, or scream, or make any sound at all, but by the time Julian carefully eased his arm down onto his thigh, so that the ravaged hand could curl loosely over the ball of his knee, his skin was clammy, his breathing ragged, and his steely eyes glazed with anguish. The necessity of the proceedings did little to ease Julian's visceral nausea at being forced to cause such pain in the name of healing. The very worst of what he'd been compelled to do in order to help General Martok paled next to this. Even working as quickly as he could, he had needed almost fifteen minutes to assess the full extent of the damage.

He still could not guess what had caused the trauma. He didn't think it could be a mere gravity-propelled impact, like a falling crate. It looked more like the Jem'Hadar's hand and been caught between two high-powered rollers and dragged into some kind of mangle. As far as Julian knew, there were no manufacturing facilities in the prison. There was old mining equipment — the ore conveyor, for one, and presumably other detritus either in the dome or across the asteroid at the power plant — but he couldn't imagine why the Jem'Hadar would be messing around with it. Whatever had caused the fractures, it had done so with considerable force applied to both sides of the hand.

Julian's exhaustion was starting to catch up with him. He was still dragged down by the energy required by his healing kidney, and he'd put in a full day's work after Deyos finished with him in the morning. He was now visiting three barracks a day, gathering his data, in addition to keeping an eye on Tain, supervising General Martok's physical therapy, and his work with the conquered combatants in the ring. He'd been awake now for twenty-three hours straight, having failed to find time for a nap today. He stepped back from his patient and caved to the urge to lean against the nearest table. Ikat'ika was watching him intently.

"You've fractured all five of your dorsal metacarpals," Julian said, addressing himself to his patient and demonstrating by drawing his index finger across the back of his own hand. "These three are displaced. The one that supports your index finger is broken clean through, but it's still aligned. The one at the base of your thumb's only cracked. Two of your first set of knuckles are crushed on both sides of the joint, and I suspect avulsion fractures of the other two. There are fourteen phalanges in your hand — the little bones that make up your fingers and thumb. Eight of them are broken. You have seven dislocations. Whatever happened, it's a serious injury."

"Repair it!" Arat'zuma snapped through clenched teeth. He did not meet Julian's eyes, staring past his First at the door instead.

"Tell me what you need, human, and I will bring it," said Ikat'ika. "The Vorta doctor left a fresh cache of bandages, if that is helpful."

Despite his focus on the patient in front of him, Julian felt a distracting burst of avarice. A fresh cache of bandages? Part of him wished idly that he had a bit more of a Ferengi streak; he might have tried to bargain for a few more supplies to replenish his inadequate stock back in the barracks. But that was entirely unethical, of course, and he didn't entertain the thought for more than an incidental instant borne of desperation.

"I can try to bandage it," Julian said. "I'd need splinting materials, too. But if I do, it won't heal properly. The crushed bones can't be set by hand. They'll heal, but they won't heal straight and he'll never regain full dexterity in the joints. Using a kar'takin will be out of the question. He'll be lucky to be able to handle a rifle."

Arat'zuma stiffened, sitting suddenly erect for the first time since Julian's thumb had found the first fracture. He held his head defiantly high. "Then I am useless, First," he said. "Kill me. For the glory of the Founders."

"Waste does not glorify the Founders," spat Ikat'ika. He glared at Julian. "You repaired the Klingon's hand so that he could fight again," he argued.

"General Martok had no broken bones," said Julian. This was technically a dissemination of privileged information, but he knew enough of the warrior's ways by now to understand that he would not object to his captors being told ways he had proved more resilient than they. "It's a completely different kind of injury."

Ikat'ika was clearly displeased, but he made no move to punish the prisoner for bearing unwelcome news. "And what do you require, if you are to preserve the joints?" he demanded.

There was nothing to preserve any more, and it would be a labour of restoration, but Julian knew what the First was asking and he did not quibble over semantics. "If I had a skeletal tractor, an osteogenic stimulator, and a cartilage regenerator, I could repair the bones and stabilize the joints in under an hour. He would have some lingering pain and stiffness, and he'd need to do some exercises for the next ten days, but after that he would have full use of his hand again."

He paused, visualizing the unidentifiable tools he had seen on the day he treated Amcet and the trainee, and then remembering the tool Tiellyn had used on his scapula and cheek. "Deyos has an osteogenic stimulator in his medkit. I don't know what the other tools look like in the Dominion, but it stands to reason he has them as well."

Ikat'ika shook his head dangerously, and Julian prepared himself for the inevitable denial. Instead, the First glared at Arat'zuma and demanded; "Do you have your sidearm?"

The younger Jem'Hadar reached awkwardly under the elbow of his brutalized arm, and pulled the plasma pistol from its holster. The contortion made him grimace, but his healthy fingers curled around it almost hungrily. "Always, First," he answered.

"Good." Ikat'ika moved for the door, pausing with his fingers just over the panel. "Guard the human. I will return."

Julian's mouth gaped with a question he couldn't vocalize over the clatter of the door. Before he could gather his wits, the First was gone. He looked instead at his patient, who was watching him with hard, tormented eyes.

"Do not make trouble, prisoner," he warned. "I will shoot you if you do."

"I thought the Vorta had given orders I'm not to be killed," said Julian quietly.

"The Vorta can only execute me once," said Arat'zuma. "I would rather die for killing you than because I am maimed."

"What if you don't have to die at all?" asked Julian.

The Jem'Hadar thrust his chin out defiantly. "All Jem'Hadar die sooner or later," he said. "For the good of the Dominion."

Julian's eyes were drawn back to the door. "Let's hope in your case it's later," he murmured.

 _(fade_ )

The hostile silence of his patient should have been uncomfortable, but now that he had no work to occupy his mind while he waited, Julian was drawn to a greater distraction. He could hear the hiss and trickle of the filtration system inside the first cistern, and the hum of the condenser in the walls. He was almost painfully aware of the pipe and spigots behind his back. He was in the same room as the prison's water filtration system.

Julian supposed he must have known the water wasn't resequenced from its constituent atoms. That would involve a piece of equipment that could be too easily converted into a replicator for more diverse applications. The other option was a system of comprehensive extraction and recycling. Deep Space Nine employed similar infrastructure to recycle its grey water. Runoff from the Cardassian bathing facilities was recovered and reused, as was the condensation produced by the hundreds of breathing, perspiring bodies on the station. Though the resulting fluid was sanitized, purified, and free of any contaminants — in other words, perfectly potable — it was used only for the sinks, the steam baths, and the hydroponics bays. Drinking water, and the water used for medical and experimental applications, was produced by the replicators.

Although the Cardassian system also allowed for recovering water from the slurry in the waste extraction systems, Federation public health standards discouraged such recycling as a first-line option. Miles O'Brien and his team had put a great deal of effort into modifying the system to incorporate the gold standard dematerializers that broke down the biohazardous waste for complete resequencing. Julian had been extremely relieved when these upgrades were completed near the end of Starfleet's first quarter on the station. He'd spent an inordinate amount of time monitoring the quality of the water produced by the Cardassian method, to say nothing of compulsively overseeing the maintenance of the filtration systems. The Federation method was more energy-intensive, but far less likely to precipitate an outbreak of disease in the event of a glitch or a system failure.

It made him feel a little ill to realize that without replicator technology in place, the Dominion would have to recycle every molecule of water produced by the prison population by less sophisticated means. Intellectually, Julian knew that the water harvested from the prisoners' urine and fecal matter had to be just as thoroughly purified (and just as free of pathogens) as any onboard Deep Space Nine — since the prisoners weren't falling dead of cholera or typhoid or hepatitis or enterovirus infections. It still made him uncomfortable to know what he'd been drinking and where it had come from.

It was an irrational feeling. Even the Federation had used such systems on its state-of-the-art vessels at one point in its history. It was probably yet another manifestation of Julian's privileged upbringing in the Alpha Quadrant's great bower of plenty that he even paused to think about it. He wasn't sure whether he ought to be more uncomfortable of this reminder that he had taken so much of his life back home for granted, or by the fact that even thinking about it now, he still wanted to go over to the spigots and drink.

Like his hunger, his thirst was constant. Julian knew the frugal two litres allowed to the prisoners wasn't enough to sustain a human body properly. The base recommendation for a person of his body mass — the mass he'd been the last time he had weighed himself, anyhow: his uniform was hanging more loosely on him now than it had on Meezan IV, and he knew he'd lost weight — was two and a half litres per day at the very minimum.  _Per day_  meaning, of course, a twenty-six hour Bajoran day, not the thirty-four hour Dominion equivalent. Taking that into consideration, Julian's ration was approximately seven hundred fifty millilitres less than his body needed and more than a litre and a half short of what he was accustomed to drinking back home. That was without accounting for the addition burden of his lacerated kidney, whatever demands were placed on his body by a diet that contained no fruits or vegetables to provide additional fluid, and the dehydration debt he'd accumulated when he first arrived in the camp.

He had learned how to parcel out his ration over the course of a Dominion Standard Day, but it took a great deal of self-discipline to do it. He was never able to drink his fill when he opened his bottle, nor even to rinse away the dryness in his mouth and the foul taste of his unclean teeth. Julian allowed himself to drink frequently enough to keep his thirst from overwhelming him, but it was a constant baseline discomfort that worsened dreadfully whenever he chanced to think about it. Right now, leaning against a table less than six metres from what in his present circumstances seemed like a limitless supply of water, Julian thought he might surrender his sanity if he had to go without even a minute longer.

He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that there was water waiting for him in the barracks. He had half a litre left: more or less what he tried to save each day to hold him through the night, the count, and the two or three hours between dismissal and ration call. When he was finished here, he could have a mouthful. It wouldn't satiate him, but it was better than nothing.

But there was water  _here_ , in this room. And he couldn't stop thinking about it. Impossible, really, while he could hear it trickling and bubbling inside the cisterns.

Julian launched himself up off the table, impelled to take three brisk steps by an unbearable wave of agitation. He might have launched into a full-fledged pacing trajectory, but Arat'zuma sat up straighter, suddenly wary, and pointed the plasma weapon at him.

"Be still, prisoner!" he barked. Julian froze. The guard glowered at him. "Return to your place. Do not move!"

"I just…" Julian began, then realized there was no point in explaining that he'd felt desperate to take some kind of action to keep from dwelling on impossible cravings. The Jem'Hadar might understand such yearnings, if couched in comparisons to their need for the White, but they would have no sympathy.

"Just?" challenged Arat'zuma.

Julian decided he had little to lose. It could not hurt to ask the question. This man needed him alive if he was to have any hope of getting his hand treated. He couldn't afford to execute him for asking a simple question.

"If I go over there," Julian said, pointing at the trough and the spigots; "and get a drink of water, will you shoot me?"

The Jem'Hadar's eyes narrowed. "A drink of water," he repeated as if the concept perplexed him.

Julian nodded. Somehow he couldn't meet the guard's eyes. He fixed his gaze on the man's crushed hand instead, below the level of the plasma pistol. He didn't understand why, but he felt an irrational shame at his words. He didn't think he felt embarrassed to show weakness — if weakness it was, to try to fulfil his body's most basic needs. It was something else. It was the humiliation of being forced into a position where he had to ask such a question, where he was at the mercy of another person's whim in his request for what was, after all, a fundamental right.

Adequate clean water was a  _fundamental right_ , and Julian had to remember that. Just because he was growing accustomed to having it denied him didn't make that any less true. Even in an age of barbarism, humanity had acknowledged that right. Civilized worlds across the Alpha Quadrant preserved that right. It wasn't for the Dominion to overthrow. They could make him grovel. They could prevent him from drinking. But they couldn't alter the truth.

"I need a drink of water," he said, more firmly now. He still couldn't meet the Jem'Hadar's eyes, but he told himself he didn't have to. "If I go and get one, will you shoot me?"

"The First instructed me to guard you," said Arat'zuma robotically. He hadn't lowered the weapon.

"I won't try to leave the room," Julian tried. "I won't attack you or look for a weapon or make trouble for you. I just want to go over to that wall and have a drink of water.  _Please_."

It hurt his pride to beg anything of his captors, but his thirst seemed all-consuming now. It had been at least a couple of hours since he'd had his last mouthful of water. And if he could drink now, the whole night would be more bearable. The physiological benefits alone surely outweighed the weight of mortification.

Arat'zuma seemed unimpressed. He snorted derisively. "That is a meaningless word," he said. "Why do you Alpha Quadrant lifeforms use it so freely?"

Julian wasn't sure if the Romulans could be said to use it "freely". He supposed Cardassians did. Garak, at least, had exquisite manners when he was in an accommodating mood. He had learned over the last few days of visiting the other barracks that most of the Cardassians responded well to courtesy.

"It's a sign of respect," said Julian softly.

The Jem'Hadar made another noise of disbelief. "You respect me, prisoner? After you have seen me weakened and wounded?"

"I would never let an injury harm my respect for another person," Julian said earnestly.

"I am a Jem'Hadar," said Arat'zuma. "We are your captors. It is fitting that you fear us, and many resent us. How can you respect us?"

"I do fear you," said Julian, still staring resolutely at the crimped fingers and the blackly bruised flesh. "I may even resent you. But everyone is worthy of respect until they prove themselves unworthy. I don't respect your Vorta, but you've given me no reason not to respect you."

"That is not the Order of Things," Arat'zuma muttered uneasily.

"My Order of Things is different from yours," Julian ventured. "That doesn't mean I hold it any less sacred than you do your own ways."

"Sacred…" the Jem'Hadar echoed. He sounded both contemptuous and puzzled. "Another word without meaning."

Julian disagreed, and thought he knew the proper analogy to change the man's mind about that. But he wasn't here to debate philological questions with the Jem'Hadar.

"If you're not going to let me drink," he said heavily; "may I at least sit down on the floor? It's been a long day."

The absurdity of that cliché in this place almost made him laugh. All days here were hellishly long, by design. If his throat hadn't stung or his mouth had felt less like sandpaper, Julian might at least have chuckled. As it was, he felt unequal to the effort. At some point, his gaze had fallen from the Jem'Hadar's hand to the seamless stone floor. He was bone-weary and so tired of going through the endless acrobatics of survival.

"No sitting!" Arat'zuma said sternly. "However, if you require water in order to function, I will allow you to drink."

Julian's head snapped up in startled disbelief. He met the black, glittering eyes and found them locked on him with cold, slightly glazed appraisal. "Thank you," he breathed, before he could reflect that these words, too, probably seemed meaningless to the soldier.

Arat'zuma retracted his grey upper lip in contempt, but the hand holding the plasma pistol was now resting on his thigh. Julian needed no further invitation. He did not run to the trough, but that was only through an extraordinary exertion of will. Once there, he hesitated. Instinct told him to twist the nearest spigot and simply put his mouth under the stream. But he had been hoarding every drop of water for weeks, and the thought of letting any of it fall undrunk — even to be recycled again — was repellent to him. Hurriedly he turned and picked up one of the canteens from the table behind him. The guard stiffened warily at the movement, watching intently, but he spoke no word of castigation and he did not raise his weapon.

Julian put the bottle under the spigot and turned the lever. For an awful instant, nothing happened, and he had time enough to reflect despairingly that there was probably a timer on the flow regulator, so that there was only water in the pipe when the Jem'Hadar were filling the bottles for the ration call. But then there was a rumble under his fingers, and a symphonic gurgle, and water came rushing down into the vessel.

He couldn't bear to wait until the bottle was full. He couldn't drink a whole litre at once anyway, no matter how much he might want to. He was chronically dehydrated. Too much water, too quickly, would make him sick. Julian knew he'd have to pace himself, even though he likely wouldn't have a chance like this again. He turned off the flow and raised the bottle to his lips. He wanted to gulp down all of it in one go, but that would probably make him vomit. Instead, he filled his mouth and let the water sit for a few seconds, settling against the dry, stinging tissues before opening his throat and letting it trickle deliciously down.

He didn't care that the water tasted faintly of sulphur and the benign mineral deposits in the ill-maintained pipes. He didn't care that at least a portion of it had almost certainly been salvaged from the waste reclamation units. He didn't care that no sentient being should ever be forced to be this grateful for a mouthful of life-giving fluid. Julian savoured the first draught. Then he took a somewhat less ambitious mouthful, and savoured that, too.

Water was glorious.

Eventually, he became aware that Arat'zuma was still watching him, both curiosity and contempt very evident upon his craggy face. Julian stole a glance over his shoulder, but he didn't really care what kind of spectacle he made. He was thirsty, and his body was in desperate need, and he drank.

 _(fade_ )


	51. Locked Out

**Part IX, Act IV: Locked Ou t**

When the bottle was empty, Julian yearned to refill it. He was still thirsty, his throat soothed but still dry and his head still aching mutely from dehydration. But his stomach was sloshing uncomfortably, and there was a sour taste of reflux in the back of his throat. A larger bolus of water was not what he needed. What he needed was two days' unrestricted access to the pipes, so he could indulge in small, frequent drinks until his body was satisfied, his skin turgor was back to normal, and his brain could be coaxed out of its constant nagging for the unobtainable.

It took considerable willpower to turn away from the spigot, intent on returning the bottle to its place on that table. Julian felt a twinge of guilt, having no idea how to clean and sterilize the vessel. Again, reason dictated that there must be some such process, since there were no signs of the prisoners swapping infectious diseases as one might expect if they shared dishes indiscriminately. But he couldn't see a device with which to do it.

That thought was driven from his mind as the door clanged open and Ikat'ika returned. He stepped boldly into the room — the Jem'Hadar seemed incapable of moving in any other way — and stopped dead when he took in the scene. Julian was standing just short of the table full of canteens, the one from which he had drunk still in his hand. The First had three medical instruments in his hands. He strode to the edge of the table nearest Arat'zuma and slammed them down upon it, before rounding the other work surface at speed. Before Julian could react and almost before he could flinch, Ikat'ika seized his arm with one rough hand and snatched the bottle with the other. He fairly flung it into the empty spot in the orderly line-up, closed that hand on Julian's opposite arm, and shook him viciously.

"Prisoners are issued their water ration once daily!" he snapped. "Stealing water is not permitted!"

Julian couldn't answer. His teeth clattered with the force of the shaking, and he felt a painful twinge in his neck as the muscles tried to keep his head from flopping like that of a rag doll. What had been indistinct discomfort took a sudden, wrenching turn into nausea, and he felt the burning in his chest intensify. Ikat'ika didn't shake him for more than twenty seconds, but it felt like an eternity. When the First released his hold, Julian staggered, disoriented. He might have fallen, but his groping left hand found the edge of the trough that was not quite deep enough to be a sink. He clung to it while his buckling knees rediscovered their ability to bear him and his head reeled.

Ikat'ika was already gone, marching back to the other side of the room to tower over his subordinate. "I told you to guard him," he said sternly. "Why did you permit such a violation of the rules?"

"The Vorta has given orders that the human is not to be killed." Arat'zuma ground out the words with an angry effort. He was trying to sound as if he was not in pain, but his suffering was obvious. "I did not think it wise to shoot him over a little water."

"And you could stop him no other way?" Ikat'ika said scornfully. "Look at him: his kind are weak. Surely a Jem'Hadar soldier can overpower one human."

The reply was almost too low for Julian to hear, at least over the roar of blood in his ears.

"You saw what he did to the Eighth, First," Arat'zuma muttered. "I believe the weakness of his species has been exaggerated."

Ikat'ika made a disgusted sound. Over his shoulder, he cast a contemptuous demand. "Get over here, prisoner, and tend to your work! I have brought the tools you requested, and there is no time to waste."

Julian pushed himself up, relinquishing the support of the trough. He was rebounding from the rough handling, and his steps were almost steady as he came around to the other table. He looked at the tools, separating out the osteogenic stimulator and studying the other two.

"How did you know which ones to take?" he asked.

Ikat'ika curled his lip in disgust. "The Jem'Hadar are not illiterate, human. You have seen the Vorta's medkit with your own eyes: each tool is labelled in the case."

Julian had forgotten that. He supposed a part of his mind didn't register the Dominionese characters as writing, since in this place he  _was_  functionally illiterate. "Which is which?" he asked.

Ikat'ika nudged him roughly aside with one shoulder, although Julian would have been content to move of his own volition. He frowned pensively at the tools for a moment and then picked each up briefly, smacking them down again in a way that made Julian cringe. That was not how one ought to handle delicate medical instruments.

"Skeletal tractor," the First spat as he moved the first one. "Cartilage regenerator. Enough stalling. Get to work."

Although Julian trusted to the man's eye for accuracy, he still tested the tool identified as the skeletal tractor before moving to his patient. He did so by applying it to the back of his own hand. It took a moment's fumbling to figure out the controls, but when he did, a shimmering blue beam emanated from the head of the device, vanishing into his skin. Julian withdrew the tool a few millimetres, and felt the slow, deep tug as his second metacarpal shifted within him. It was an uneasy feeling, but he stopped before it could become uncomfortable. Satisfied, he picked up the osteogenic stimulator as well, and moved to Arat'zuma's side.

It was another procedure that would have been far easier to perform with a trained assistant. Nurse Jabara — any of the Deep Space Nine nurses, really — would have known what was needed without Julian even having to vocalize it. His medical technicians would have needed only the occasional instruction, and they would have understood the medical jargon that was second nature to Julian. As it was, he had only Ikat'ika to aid him. Julian told him how to immobilize the arm, and the First did so with ruthless efficiency that bordered on roughness. Every time Julian gave a direction, he was met with a black glare that clearly communicated that guards did not take orders from prisoners. He did his best to communicate with his tone that these were requests, not commands, but all three of them knew differently.

Funnily enough, Ikat'ika was not the most sullen aide Julian had ever worked with. As he repaired the dorsal metacarpals one by one, realigning the bones with the miniature tractor beam and then knitting the fractures with the osteogenic stimulator, Julian found himself remembering Yeto. The Klingon mercenary had been part of a strike team that had invaded the station when a rare ion storm had led to an evacuation of everyone but the senior staff and Quark, who had refused to leave for reasons that had alter become clear. Led by a renegade Trill bent on stealing the Dax symbiont, Yeto and the others had overtaken the station and forced Julian to perform the single most horrifying procedure of his medical career.

He had initially refused, and would have held that position resolutely in the face of death. But he had not been the only one threatened, and in order to save the lives of everyone else aboard Deep Space Nine, Jadzia had implored him to do as their captors commanded. Under armed guard, Julian had removed her symbiont and transferred Dax into Verad. During the long, hellish night of fighting to keep Jadzia alive while her isoboromine levels fluctuated and her body tried so resolutely to die, Julian had bullied Yeto into acting as his nurse. The Klingon had shown nothing but contempt for Jadzia, incapable of seeing her heroism for what it was. But at least he had obeyed, and she had lasted out the night until her crewmates were able to overpower the hijackers and Julian could return Dax to its rightful host.

Ikat'ika had this much to commend him over Yeto: he was invested in the fate of the patient. Whenever Julian could spare a moment from watching his hands and the surgical field, he stole glimpses of Arat'zuma's face, taut with silent anguish, and of Ikat'ika's. The First, too, watched his subordinate whenever he was able, and despite his perpetual stony scowl, there was genuine concern in his cold eyes. When Julian had to call for an adjustment of position, or to instruct his assistant how to support one of the broken fingers, the change was made with meticulous precision, if not precisely gentleness.

Knowing first-hand how agonizing the Dominion's osteogenic stimulators were, Julian couldn't help but be awed by Arat'zuma's fortitude. He ground his teeth and sucked in ragged breaths, and by the time Julian had repaired the last of the shattered knuckles he was trembling to his core, but he did not cry out.

At first, Julian had made attempts to talk to his patient as he worked. But the stony silence from Arat'zuma and the black looks from Ikat'ika had cowed him soon enough. Clearly the bedside manner that had won him accolades in medical school and served him well all through his years of practice — even with gruff General Martok — was not appreciated by the Jem'Hadar. Julian quickly abandoned the effort and worked with quiet efficiency.

It was challenging, doing all of this without the benefit of an imaging scanner. Fortunately, the skeletal tractor was very responsive, and Julian was able to work by feel. All the tissues of the hand were designed to support the bones in their proper configuration, too, and they were only too eager to be coaxed back into their rightful places. Still, it was slow going. He was just about to start on the phalanges, and had thankfully switched off both tools to adjust his position when the klaxon blared out, startling Julian badly and making him flinch.

His heart was hammering with the shock as the Second's cold voice echoed over the comm system. "Twenty seconds to curfew," he said robotically. "Prisoners, twenty seconds to curfew."

Julian looked anxiously up at the dreary grey ceiling. There was no way he could get back to his barracks in twenty seconds, even running at full tilt. He couldn't leave his patient in any case: he had at least another twenty minutes' work here, assuming the Dominion's cartilage regenerators were as efficient as the Federation model. But what were the consequences of missing curfew?

"Back to work, human," Ikat'ika growled. "You can take your rest when you have done your work."

"That's not…" Julian began, then closed his mouth with an effort. There wasn't much point voicing his fears to his captors, and he didn't suppose the First would be interested in reassuring him if he asked questions. The only thing he could do was get on with the repair, and hope they wouldn't hold him responsible for something that wasn't his fault.

When the last of the broken bones was mended, Julian reduced the dislocations of the interphalangeal joints. As Martok had been, Arat'zuma seemed surprised by the gentleness of the motion required to do so. Even as he moved from one finger to the next, Julian could feel some of the rigid resistance ebbing from the Jem'Hadar's arm, and when next he stole a glance at his patient's face, Arat'zuma looked spent with relief. The worst of the pain was gone.

Regenerating the cartilage was easy enough. Julian gave instructions to his patient, having him flex and stretch each joint as he worked, stopping when he reported a feeling of normal strength and stability. Again, it was strange to do any of this without the benefit of a tricorder. It was strangely exhilarating, too. It forced Julian to use his skills in a way he never really had before, and he found himself rising admirably to the challenge.

"There," he said at last, straightening a spine he hadn't even realized had begun to ache with stooping. He put the regenerator on the worktable with the other tools, and rolled his shoulders before raising an arm to stretch. "How do you feel?"

Arat'zuma raised his hand before his face, rippling his fingers and turning it over to examine the palm as he made a fist, stretched his hand wide, and clenched again. Visually, the repair was perfect. Only the bruises, black as charcoal on the grey, mottled skin, remained to indicate there had been any trauma.

Ikat'ika was watching his subordinate intently. Suddenly he bent his elbow, flipping up his palm rigidly against his ribs. Arat'zuma looked at him questioningly, and the First nodded once. The younger Jem'Hadar drew back his fist and blasted it into his commander's palm with enough force to splinter a board. Ikat'ika did not even budge: his hand, arm and body absorbed the blow as if carved of stone. Arat'zuma studied his hand again, flexed the fingers once more, and looked up with blazing triumph.

"I just need to feel the joints to be sure everything's healed," Julian ventured, approaching with care.

Arat'zuma made a dismissive noise, even as he yielded his hand for examination. "It is healed," he declared.

"All the same," said Julian. He took the Jem'Hadar's hand with both of his own, kneading the back and testing the joints. Then he held out his first two fingers. "Let me feel your grip strength, please."

The guard almost smirked as he curled his hand around Julian's fingers and squeezed. At once, the doctor felt his own bones grinding together, and sharp pain lanced along his nerves. He stiffened, but neither voiced his pain nor tried to pull away.

"Enough," said Ikat'ika, just when the pressure began to grow unbearable. Arat'zuma looked disappointed, but he let go.

Julian curled his other hand reflexively over his aching fingers and took a step back. Arat'zuma rose smoothly from his seat, snapping to attention.

"With your permission, First, I will return to my duties," he said. His eyes glinted as he glanced at Julian. "Unless you wish me to deal with the prisoner."

"I will tend to that," said Ikat'ika. "Do not forget: the Cardassian is due his daily allotment."

"I never forget, First," said the guard. "Unless I am instructed to do so."

Arat'zuma moved off towards the trough along the far wall. From the shelf beneath the table, where the prisoners' metal plates were stacked twenty high, he took a shallow bowl of the same alloy. It was smaller than the plates, but it had higher sides. He took it to the taps and filled it.

The sound of water made every cell in Julian's body protest with yearning. He would have been able to stomach more water now: another quarter of a litre at least. He didn't dare to ask for it. He had no idea what his status was now that he had fulfilled his purpose in the eyes of the First. For all he knew, Ikat'ika was about to turn him over to the Second so that Boran'itrex could  _enjoy himself_.

Arat'zuma was at the door now, and it squalled violently open. Ikat'ika collected the instruments from the table and looked coldly at Julian. "Come," he commanded.

Julian followed him wordlessly, trying to quell his dread and to reign in the part of his brain that loved to compute worst-case scenarios. The other Jem'Hadar was just striding through the door opposite the kitchen, stepping into a darkened space that seemed narrower than either the kitchen or the cargo bay. Julian only got a glimpse before the door slid shut behind Arat'zuma, and Ikat'ika was already moving back towards the inner airlock.

It was a relief to step back into the atrium. Julian was accustomed to physical discomfort melting away while he worked, his own bodily needs subsumed by his absorption in tending to his patient's. Fatigue, hunger, and even thirst were forgotten at such times, and so he hadn't really noticed how cold he had grown in the kitchen. The rest of the prison was hardly balmy: fifteen degrees Celsius wasn't nearly warm enough for human comfort. But it was markedly warmer than the environment past the airlock. The tight, constrained shivering eased, and Julian was able to relax his limbs a little as he rounded the back of the administration pod in Ikat'ika's wake.

The First turned and glared at him. "Do not follow me," he hissed menacingly. "I must now attempt to smuggle these tools back into the medkit without drawing attention from the Vorta or his spies. I cannot do that with you trailing after me like a  _narvak_."

Julian didn't recognize the word, and the Universal Translator apparently had no Federation equivalent. The tone was clear enough: it was some kind of contemptible animal. He stepped back hurriedly, distancing himself from the First just in chase a  _narvak_  was something one usually kicked. But he could not simply wander back to join his comrades. The door to Barracks 6 was surely locked down.

"It's after curfew," Julian ventured. "What am I supposed to do?"

Ikat'ika glared at him indifferently. "I do not care what you  _do,_ human," he spat. "You have served your purpose."

And he strode off, leaving Julian alone.

( _fade_ )

For a couple of awful, agonizingly long minutes, Julian just stood there. He was out of sight of the nearest sentries, and probably as safe as it was possible for him to be under the circumstances. But he was paralyzed. He didn't know where to go or what to do, and the bewildered helplessness of being faced with a choice without any idea of his options was strangely horrifying.

He remembered Miles's return from Argratha, and how he had struggled to make the simplest decisions. Accustomed to being robbed of all agency and choice by the twenty years of memories implanted in his brain, he'd been overwhelmed by the scope of options in his daily life. Working to help his friend readjust, Julian had done enough reading into the effects of incarceration to understand this was a common problem. In the days before the comprehensive rehabilitation services and supports the Federation provided its parolees, the stress of trying to function in a world of choice had even led people to reoffend just to return to the comfort of a structured existence. He thought he was feeling some small part of that stress and panic now.

It wasn't quite the same, of course. Julian had far more scope for decision-making here than Miles had been given in the Argrathi prison simulation. For twenty-four hours in each daily period, he was free to move about the compound as he pleased. Yet still the rules and expectations provided a structure to his choices that was missing now. He didn't know what was expected of him in these circumstances. He had no idea what the consequences would be if he misstepped. He felt exposed and disproportionately terrified.

He couldn't stand here all night, though. He was exhausted, and even as he stood there, a tremor of fatigue shuddered through his body. Even the hard, narrow cot seemed tempting, and as much as he rebelled against the idea, Julian found himself longing for the familiar shelter of his cell.

It was possible, just  _possible_ , that the barracks doors were only disabled from the inside at night. It was conceivable that the could still be opened from without. It was worth a try, wasn't it? What else was he supposed to do?

Scrubbing his face with one cold palm, Julian tried to calm his clamouring thoughts. Fear and fatigue were telling on him, and he knew he wasn't very rational. He was lucid enough, though, to know it wouldn't be wise to simply stroll up the middle of the atrium on the most direct route back to his pod. As far as he knew, only three Jem'Hadar were aware he'd been singled out by the First for special duties this evening. One of them, the Second, wouldn't be especially respectful of that service. And that left twenty-seven who wouldn't see him differently than they would any other prisoner abroad after curfew.

Julian found himself wishing he'd asked more probing questions about disciplinary action in the prison. It had seemed simpler to obey the rules so that he never needed to learn the cost of disobedience. It had not occurred to him that he could be forced into a position where it was impossible to obey.

He was feeling increasingly unsteady, and he moved to lean against the wall of the administration unit. Julian closed his eyes, visualizing the atrium and the positions of the pairs of Jem'Hadar sentries. He imagined their sightlines, and as he mapped all of this out, he understood that his situation was impossible. They were deprived of the usual tactical challenges faced by their people in combat, so these Jem'Hadar had made the prison their battlefield. They had clearly spent a great deal of time and effort devising an appropriate grid for supervising the atrium. Where they positioned themselves during the day, not so much as a square metre of floor was unsurveilled. He didn't know if they maintained that level of vigilance at night, but if they did, he had no hope of reaching his barracks unobserved.

At least he could move along the wall, trying to keep to the shadows. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. And he could hope that there were fewer men on duty when the prisoners were locked down. It was one of those moments when Julian found himself envying people like Major Kira and Commander Worf, who nurtured religious faith. He would have loved to be able to put his fate in the hands of a deity right now. Maybe then he would have been less frightened as he shoved himself off the wall, rounded the corner of the pod, and stepped out into the open.

There were two Jem'Hadar at the base of the nearest pillar. They were talking to one another in low, muttered tones that neither Julian's sensitive ears nor the Universal Translator could quite decipher. It was strange to see these disciplined killers engaging in such a humans activity: gossiping at one's post didn't seem like something the Dominion encouraged or tolerated. Certainly Julian had never observed the guards doing such things before. A flash of paranoia worthy of Garak took him, and he was momentarily convinced they were talking about him: either his presence at the White ceremony, or the fact that the First had enlisted his labour afterwards.

But if they were talking about him, at least they weren't looking at him. Julian moved swiftly and silently into the shadow of the pylon, and then scurried to the dubious shelter of the wedge-shaped space between the administration pod and the barracks unit to its left. He leaned against the wall for a moment or two, debating whether to cut across the throat of the gap — the more expedient path — or to retreat into the space between in the hope that he might be less conspicuous.

He settled on the shorter route. It wasn't just a matter of weariness: the longer he was out in the open, the greater the chance of drawing notice. When he inched around the corner of this pod, he saw that there were indeed fewer soldiers on duty in the atrium at present — about half as many, in fact. He was gauging their positions and trying to map out their blind spots when a stern, stentorian voice made him jump.

"You! Prisoner! It is forbidden to be out of the barracks after curfew!"

Julian's insides grew watery with dread and disappointment, and he felt the animal urge to run. He didn't, in part because he wasn't sure he was in sound enough condition for the exertion but mostly because he knew they would chase him. Even at his healthiest, he'd find it difficult to outrun a Jem'Hadar — and in this place, there was no where he could hope to escape them. So he stood fast and let them come.

Three of them converged on him, two with rifles ready. The third lunged in, closing his fingers around Julian's sternum. It was the same move the Eighth had used on him in the ring, digging into the intercostal spaces, forcing his ribs to spread. It was exponentially more painful on this part of his ribcage. Nerves Julian had only ever understood as spidery lines on an anatomical map exploded in fiery anguish, and although no air was forced from him, his lungs seemed paralyzed, the air within them stagnant. He fought the urge to scream, but he could not stop a stuttering moan of blind torment as he was dragged away from the wall, feet scuffling disjointedly.

"You are forbidden to wander the compound at this hour!" the Jem'Hadar snarled. "Those who disobey are subject to disciplining."

One of the others made a low, savage noise of anticipation, and Julian was dimly aware of the soldiers slinging their rifles across their backs. It seemed he was in for a beating after all, but at that moment he just wanted the bone-biting pressure on his breastbone to ease. His vision was flooded with brilliant starbursts of agony, and he was certain that he was about to black out. But the mercy of unconsciousness didn't come, and the pain intensified as the Jem'Hadar began to twist his clawed fingers.

"What is this?" another voice demanded, in a clear note of command. It was a vaguely familiar voice, but it was not Ikat'ika. Dizzily, Julian sent out a wild prayer to any gods or Prophets who might be listening that it was not the Second instead. "Release him: he cannot breathe. A dead prisoner is no sport."

Julian gasped in a hungry gulp of air as the hold on his chest released. He couldn't stand: he crashed to his knees, clutching at his chest and trying to regain control of his mind. He remembered Miles trying to describe the manoeuvre to him seven months ago. When the  _Defiant_ had been boarded by the Founder who liked to take female form, one of her bodyguards had employed it on the Chief of Operations.  _Hurt like hell_ , Miles had concluded.

He was a man of few words, at times, but he always managed to hit the nail on the head.

"Sir!" the Jem'Hadar who had seized him said crisply. Julian, bowed over his lap and clawing the floor with one had while the other massaged his chest as if trying to stave off angina pains, couldn't raise his head to see which superior officer had stepped up. "This prisoner is abroad after curfew!"

"I can see that," the other said coldly. "I will take him into my custody. Return to your posts."

"But sir, we are permitted to punish the prisoners as we see fit, if any disobey the curfew," the guard protested discontentedly. There were sounds of agreement from the other two. Julian was surrounded: the corner of the pod at his back, and the soldiers in a tight arc around him. If they decided to rain down blows, or to start kicking, or to draw their weapons again, he would be defenceless in this position. He slid one foot out from under his thigh and tried to plant it firmly next to his other knee. His whole body felt shaky and somehow remote, however, and the change was not a forceful one. At least now he could rest his brow against his patella for a moment.

"I will see to it," the other Jem'Hadar said.

"Sir, if we could be permitted to assist you—"

He sounded almost like a child trying to negotiate the rescinding of a coveted privilege. Obviously, this interference was derailing a much-anticipated treat. That thought made Julian feel sicker still. A bewildered part of his brain still could not comprehend what his life had become.

" _No_." It was a savage snarl. "The human did  _this_  to me!" There was a rustling, jabbing motion. "He is mine. I am not interested in your input. Disperse!"

They went. Julian straightened at last as he heard their booted feet clatter away, cupping both hands over his upraised knee as he prepared to rise. He thought he knew whose hands he had landed in this time, and he knew that could not be good. But he was determined to meet his fate on his feet instead of cowering on the floor.

Eighth Talak'ran seized his shoulder and hauled him roughly up so that they were almost nose-to-nose. "You are a fool, human," he hissed. "The Vorta's admonitions and the First's interventions are no good to you at night!"

So someone had seen the exchange with the Second, after all. Julian supposed the Jem'Hadar observed a great deal more than even their higher-ranking fellows assumed. He forced himself to meet the eyes of the man he had maimed. Boran'itrex's hatred of him was at one remove, probably more a reflection of his own bloodlust than Julian's deeds. The Eighth, however, had just cause to despise him.

"If you saw the First lead me away," he said levelly, although he knew it was not wise to try to argue his case; "then you know I didn't miss the curfew of my own volition. He had work for me."

Talak'ran curled his lip. "What kind of work?"

Julian thought about the secrecy, the meeting in a remote part of the complex, and the purloining of the medical equipment. "That's confidential," he said.

The Jem'Hadar cocked is head uncomprehendingly. "Confidential?" he repeated, as if he had never heard the word.

"Private," Julian said. "I'm not allowed to talk about it."

Talak'ran smiled chillingly. "Not even if I will snap your neck if you do not?" he asked. "I can do it so that you will live, satisfying the Vorta's command. But you will wish for death."

Julian couldn't even comprehend how unbearable life in a Dominion prison camp would be for a quadriplegic, but neither was he willing to compromise his beliefs and his ethical backbone — not even to preserve his physical one. "Not even then," he said.

The Eighth made a noise of disgusted bewilderment. His grip on Julian's shoulder tightened and his eyes shifted to the left. Two of the nearest sentries were watching intently, and one of them had taken an eager step forward, obviously also wanting a share of the fun.

 _Do you want a piece of this_? B.C., the ghost in Sanctuary District A, had once asked Julian and Commander Sisko that question, gesturing to a bloody, beaten man his gang had attacked for nothing more than the canary-yellow ration card that entitled him to two meagre, barely-adequate meals a day. Julian had refused him coldly, even though that might not have been wise. Considering that the very next evening, the ghosts had targeted  _him_  instead, it hadn't been wise at all. But it had been right.

Julian had been denied the chance to step in and defend the poor man back in 2024, held back by Sisko and by the necessity of preserving the timeline. It wasn't lost on Julian that the following night, his commander had been unable to exert similar restraint upon himself, and stand idly by while Julian, instead of a twenty-first century human with a chromosomal abnormality, took a beating. Sisko's intervention had resulted in a street fight that had caused the timeline to collapse. Over the next three days, both Starfleet officers had paid a steep penance for that.

This time, no one would step in, unless it was to join in the fun. All the people who might have intervened were locked away behind airtight bulkheads.

"Move!" the Eighth snarled, pushing Julian ahead of him, up the atrium towards the glowing rim of the arena. A moment later, Julian felt the pitiless nose of a plasma rifle nudging at his floating ribs. His flank still ached, deeply and dully, on that side, and he was all too aware of his still-healing organ as he was driven forward towards the ring.

Were they going to have a rematch? He wasn't as fit for combat now as he had been on the day he faced Talak'ran, and the Jem'Hadar was unlikely to underestimate him. Julian had thought perhaps his best strategy next time would be to put up only cursory resistance, in the hope that once he was down, the First would call an end to the contest under the auspices of the Order of Things. But in an unofficial bout, without Ikat'ika's supervising eye, that might be just as likely to get him killed while he cowered on the floor.

Lost in these frenzied thoughts, he was taken by surprise when Talak'ran nudged him left instead of right: not towards the ring, but towards the door that led to Barracks 1 through 6.

During the day, the entrances to the corridors were locked open. Now, it was closed. The Eighth keyed in a code on the panel, and the door screeched open with a  _clang_. "Inside!" he barked, shoving Julian over the threshold so that he could not help but stumble. He thrust out a hand to catch himself against the wall. The door slid closed, and he and Talak'ran were sealed in the corridor, separated by one blast door from the other guards, and from almost three dozen prisoners by the other six. There was the door to the waste reclamation unit, too, of course, but it wasn't airtight like the others and Julian doubted anyone was inside.

Julian didn't know what to expect, but he did know he wasn't interested in submitting meekly. He knew his own ornery streak had plenty to do with that attitude, but he also couldn't help but remember Garak, speaking of the Klingons who had assaulted him in his shop.  _Ah, but I got off several cutting remarks which no doubt did serious damage to their egos_.

"No audience?" he challenged, turning to face Talak'ran. "I thought maybe you wanted a rematch."

He waited for the Eighth to strike him, but the Jem'Hadar only raked cold eyes over his body. "If you are ever permitted back in the ring, I will take great pleasure in defeating you," he said.

Julian was take aback by this. Curiosity overrode insolence. "What do you mea, if I'm ever permitted back?" he asked. "The Second made it sound like it's only a matter of time."

The Eighth looked uneasy, as if he knew he should not have disseminated this information. "You are not to be used for training purposes until further notice," he said. "The Vorta doctor was… displeased by the condition in which she found you. She has given orders that if you are similarly damaged upon her return, there will be grave consequences."

A part of Julian was profoundly, almost wretchedly, grateful to know this. But it was also unsettling. It reminded him of nothing so much as Keiko's bonsai trees, left in her husband's charge with strict instructions for care. Or the directions Julian had given his own staff about tending his prion cultures while he was away at the burn treatment conference. The care and tending of samples, experiments and projects was an important consideration for any scientist, be they botanist or physician. That didn't mean it felt good to be the specimen.

"Who told you this?" Julian asked. "The Vorta? The First?"

"No one  _told_  me," said Talak'ran. "It is known."

Julian took a deep breath. "Is that why you've brought me here?" he asked. "So that you can beat me where there are no witnesses?"

"You will remain here until the dormancy period is over," the Eighth said sternly. "I can discourage entry to this pod until then, but if you wander the compound at large, the others will satisfy their thirst for your blood. You are despised among the Jem'Hadar, prisoner. What you did to me in the ring revolts us on a primal level you cannot understand. It is a violation not lightly to be borne."

He was going to guard the door? To keep the other Jem'Hadar at bay so that Julian would survive the night? That made little enough sense, and the subsequent remarks only served to confuse him further.

"What about you?" he asked, too confounded to weigh the wisdom of the question.

"I?" said Talak'ran. He glowered grimly. "If I had been left to the care of the Vorta, I would have been executed twelve days ago. I still do not understand how the First persuaded him to let me live, but I know he could not have done so if you had not sealed my wound and made provision for me to be dosed with the White. This is my repayment of that debt. Do not waste it. And do  _not_  claim that I have shown you favour."

Julian had never seen a Jem'Hadar concerned with discharging a personal obligation before. He couldn't quite believe he was seeing it now. But neither was he going to question this unexpected reprieve.

"Can you let me back into my barracks?" he asked breathlessly, nodding at the door.

Talak'ran glared at him. "Do not press your luck," he growled. Then he relented and explained; "No one beneath the rank of Third has the codes for the barracks doors. Only those who are Twelfth or greater can unseal the pods. Be grateful you tried your barbarous trick on me, and not your first opponent."

He turned on his heel and unsealed the door, striding out into the atrium. As the door slid closed, he was already taking up a wide-legged stance with his rifle at low ready.

Julian stood only a moment in numb astonishment. Then he fairly ran to the door to Barracks 6. He might have tried overriding the panel if he'd had some kind of tool — or even a working understanding of the Dominion writing system. As it was, the only thing he could do was inform his cellmates that he was alive and in no immediate danger. Crowding against the right-hand window, he knocked emphatically upon it.

Kalenna was at the other side of the pane almost before Julian could strike the glass a fourth time. Her eyes were wild with worry, and they widened at the sight of him. She gestured frantically towards the control panel on her side. Julian looked pointedly down at his and shook his head. Her shoulders slumped a little, but she was saying something over her shoulders. A moment later, Martok was beside her, his craggy face also furrowed with equal measures of concern and relief.

Kalenna mouthed something, but Julian couldn't make sense of it. One thing the Universal Translator was useless for was lip reading. She was speaking Romulan, and he didn't know the mouth movements. They were evocative of Vulcan, but too far divergent for his unpracticed eye to decode. Julian shook his head, holding up his hands helplessly to show that he could not understand. With a little, despairing twitch of the lips, Kalenna sighed visibly.

Then Martok tried. His was a single movement, an almost circular pursing of the lips that spread into a fissure. That one Julian did recognize, partly because it was a single simple vowel sound and partly because it was one of the phrases he knew in two dozen languages he could not otherwise speak. He had learned a few key sentences in all of them, because even when the Universal Translator failed he had to be able to practice his craft. Some of the others he knew included "I am a doctor", "I can help you", and "Is that painful?"

What Martok had said was "'Oy'?" Loosely translated and accounting for the fact that in Klingon, most verbs were optional, it meant, "Have you been harmed?"

Julian shook his head emphatically. First he mouthed the word  _no,_ then wrapped his tongue around its Klingon equivalent: qo'. He had a feeling he'd butchered the shape badly, and it was impossible to capture a glottal stop without actually vocalizing anything. But Martok seemed to understand. He spoke to Kalenna, and she drew a hand over her mouth in obvious relief.

She spoke to the General, and he shook his head frustratedly. Kalenna looked at Julian again, opening her mouth to speak, then closed it, discouraged. He thought he knew what she wanted to ask, but she couldn't convey it in a way he would understand. It occurred to him almost drunkenly that this must be a little like how the Breen felt every minute of every brutally long day: longing to communicate, but unable to do so save by the most rudimentary means.

In any case, there was nothing to be done. They couldn't let him in, any more than he could let them out. He was trapped in this corridor until morning, and there was no help for it. Julian pressed his palms together and pillowed his cheek upon them, tipping his head, closing his eyes and letting his face go briefly slack. As he opened them again, he pointed down at the floor. Kalenna instinctively tried to look down past the bottom of the window. She couldn't, of course, but she nodded and mimicked his sign for  _sleep_. Then she pressed her palm to the glass, fingers splayed.

Julian put his own over hers, aligning his long, slender fingers with hers. The thick, pressure-resistant surface separated them, but for a moment he thought he could feel living warmth. At the very least, he felt far less alone. Even here, there were people who cared whether he lived or died. They'd be waiting for him in the morning, and he dared to believe they would rest easier knowing he still drew breath.

Kalenna withdrew, moving with uncharacteristic weariness towards her bunk. Martok remained for a moment, regarding Julian solemnly. Then he straightened his posture and clapped his right fist — loosely bent because of the hampering bandages — to his chest. This time, Julian recognized the word he barked more by the gesture than by the movement of his lips.  _Qapla':_ the Klingon salutation of good fortune and a wish for triumph.

Julian mirrored the gesture, nodding his head wordlessly. Martok gave him a brief, bracing grin. Then he, too, moved away from the door. He didn't return to his bare-slatted cot, however. He went only as far as the nearest bench and sat down upon its end, facing the door. He braced his feet broadly and fixed his eyes on the door. Julian understood, and even though there was no way Martok could come to his aid, he felt inexplicably less exposed.

The General would keep the watch.

With one last look of earnest gratitude, Julian turned away from the door, pressing his back to the wall beside it. Wearily, grateful for the chance to get off his tired and unsteady legs, he slid down the wall. He didn't want to lie down on the gritty stone floor, so he settled with his back to his barracks and his legs drawn up. He crossed his arms over his knees, and rested his heavy head upon them. He didn't think he'd be able to sleep in this position, but he closed his eyes anyway. Just that one small gesture of repose seemed to dispel the weary weight of tension that had been dragging on him for hours, and Julian let himself drift into a semiconscious stupor of relief.

( _fade_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**bolus:** A large volume of fluid administered rapidly, often in a time-sensitive emergency.

 **skin turgor:** The elasticity of the skin; reduced in cases of severe or chronic dehydration.


	52. Locked In

**Part IX, Act V: Locked In**

Julian awoke to a shoe in his ribs, nudging insistently but not quite painfully. It was enough to topple him from his precarious pose, slouched low against the wall with his legs stretched across the corridor. He felt himself tipping to the left even before he was quite certain he was awake, and a brief eternity before he remembered where he was and what had happened the night before. Julian thrust out his hand, which had been tucked under the opposite elbow, and slapped it against the floor to keep from falling all the way. His other harm shot up to shield his head as he looked up, groggy and startled, into the broad, stony face of Enabran Tain.

A moment later, Major Kalenna was pushing past the elderly Cardassian, rounding him from behind and dropping to her knees by Julian's legs. She shot Tain a look that could have split the polar ice caps of Breen, and then turned her attention to the Starfleet officer.

"Are you harmed?" she asked. "What happened? What did the guards do to you."

"Nothing," Julian croaked. He blinked the grit out of his eyes and pushed himself up with palm and heel until he was sitting straight, his back still braced on the wall. A sharp, sickening pain ran up the right side of his neck as he tried to level off his head as well: his sternocleidomastoid muscle spasmed painfully, and his arm abandoned its defensive position so that he could clap his hand over it. His lips parted in a soundless moan of quotidian misery as the pain faded to an achy stiffness. He had what was still, after centuries of musculoskeletal science, best described simply as a crick in the neck.

Tain had to shift position as General Martok came to the door. He did so by encroaching further into Julian's personal space, now digging at his hip instead of his ribs with the toe of his shoe. Julian tried to scoot to the left, but it wasn't a very well-coordinated effort. He was rapidly becoming aware of a half dozen other minor aches and discomforts, almost all of which he owed to trying to falling asleep sitting up. His coccyx felt pummelled and tender, his right knee was stiff, most of his thoracic vertebrae felt cramped and compressed and in need of a good stretch. And his bladder was almost painfully full.

He dimly remembered getting up some time in the silence of the long, uncomfortable night, and making his way down to the end of the pod. He had reasoned that if he was going to be shut out of his barracks all night, at least there was this one silver lining, as meagre as it might seem. Between missing his usual pre-curfew visit to the waste reclamation unit, and the extra half-litre of water, Julian had even then been quite ready to urinate. But he had found, inexplicably and perversely, that the door to the communal toilets was also locked. He didn't know why anyone would bother, when the prisoners were all supposed to be shut up in their barracks. He could only assume Deyos took some kind of twisted pleasure in the petty indignity. Julian had returned to his patch of floor unsatisfied, and he was now experiencing considerable urgency in that organ system.

Martok lowered himself effortfully to one knee. Julian's clinician's mind noted the stiffness of the movement, and every hampered joint that struggled to carry it out. The General did a good job of hiding his pain and his impaired range of motion most of the time, but first thing in the morning, after long hours lying immobile while everything began to seize up, he could only conceal so much.

"Doctor," he said gravely. "I trust you did not mislead us last night? They did you no injury?"

"No," Julian said again. He was starting to wake up now, and his mind was clearing. "They took me to witness the distribution of the Ketracel White, as Deyos promised. Then the First had work for me…"

"Work?" Tain said suspiciously. "What kind of work?"

The other doors were clattering open, and prisoners were hastening out for the early morning crush in the waste reclamation room. Julian hastily drew up his other knee, and Kalenna stepped aggressively to block the middle of the corridor as the prisoners in Barracks 1 started filing out. They couldn't step on Julian without first jostling her, and the two Romulans, at least, looked  _very_  disinclined to push past a Major in the Tal Shiar. They skirted behind her instead, their cellmates from other worlds doing the same.

Julian considered the question, and the prudence of answering. He knew he owed his cellmates the truth: his only loyalties in this place were to them and to the Federation. But he wasn't sure he wanted to risk other prisoners overhearing. If gossip spread through the camp, Ikat'ika would know who to blame.

"I'll explain later," he said, trying to sit up a little straighter still in the hope that it would relieve some of the pressure on his bladder. "It took longer than expected, and I was locked out. The Eighth…" He saw Kalenna's eyes go wide at this, and knew it was too late to put off this part of the tale until later. "The Eighth stopped the others, who seemed to think a prisoner out after curfew was fair game for their sport, and he told me to stay in here. He called it repayment of his debt."

"For repairing the wound to his neck," Kalenna said knowingly. She glared at Tain. "I told you that it was wise of him to agree to treat both opponents in the ring."

"Doctor," Martok rumbled, holding out a slender object that was dwarfed by his strong left hand. It was the handle of the stolen stylus. "I am sorry to beset you, but it must be done."

Julian nodded and took the improvised lancet. The point was starting to wear down, and he wished he had a surface to whet it against, but he was also too worn down to exert the effort of finding a solution. He jabbed at his left ring finger fiercely until he punctured the skin and raised a globe of blood. Martok had his index finger outstretched to receive it, and Julian smeared the crimson fluid on the Klingon's dusky skin. Martok rubbed it himself, then raised his fingertips to his nostrils to smell it, and nodded in satisfaction, taking back the tool.

Kalenna offered her hand, and Julian took it for balance and leverage as he climbed stiffly to his feet. His other hand found the small of his back almost of its own volition, kneading sore sinews, and he tried to roll his neck into a decent stretch. It was no good: his right side was locked in a resistant spasm.

 _Really, Doctor, you should know better than to try to sleep sitting up at your age. You're not a young thing anymore_. The voice in the back of his mind sounded so uncannily like Garak that Julian half expected to turn around and see the Cardassian tailor standing there, leaning on the doorpost of Barracks 5. Another part of his brain, this one definitely his own voice, speaking with narrow-eyed indignation, argued,  _I'm not even thirty-two yet_.

The last time he'd slept sitting up had been three hundred and forty-nine years ago, Julian thought inanely. A part of him wanted to laugh at that, because it had only been two years as he experienced time and that seemed wildly funny. A more sober corner of his brain wondered if he wasn't becoming just a little unglued at the corners.

"I need to…" he muttered, trying to gather a more essential train of thought. Somehow, standing up had increased the urgency of his need to urinate instead of easing it. He rocked a thumb over his shoulder, and hoped the others understand.

"I'll go with you," Tain said silkily, taking Julian by the arm in an unsettlingly possessive gesture. "Care to join us, Major?"

Kalenna never joined the morning clamour, preferring to choose quieter times when she might at least have a hope of privacy. Julian had also noticed she never entered the waste reclamation room without Parvok, and he could not help but think that some of her early encounters with the prison's Cardassian population had occurred in such places. That thought made him feel almost physically ill, and he didn't resist as Tain herded him away from the others while Martok was still climbing gracelessly to his feet.

As soon as they were past the door to Barracks 2, Tain leaned in to hiss into Julian's ear. "You were meddling, weren't you?" he snarled. " _Treating_  one of the Jem'Hadar! You're a damnable fool, Julian Bashir, and I won't stand for it any longer."

"Would it have been better to refuse?" Julian bit back. He was sore and ill-rested, struggling to maintain control over an imperative bodily function, and in no mood for Enabran Tain's ultimatums. "The Second wanted to 'enjoy himself' with me, and the First offered me an alternative. It's no different than what I've been doing for them in the ring."

"It is different!" Tain spat. They were at the door now, and the spymaster hauled Julian to the side as two much younger Cardassians trudged out, quickening their pace anxiously when they saw who was lurking without. "What you do at the ring doesn't get you locked out for the night. Do you have any idea what the Jem'Hadar usually do to curfew-breakers? Do you know what they could have done to you?"

"What does that matter to you?" snapped Julian under his breath as Tain hauled him over the threshold and into the overcrowded room. Six men occupied the units. The others were in two tightly coiled lines: one for the waste reclamators, and one for the sterilization alcove in the wall. One Romulan gave up on the second queue after a sullen glance, and left the room without cleaning his hands. "You've got what you needed from me, and I'm no good to you as a doctor, not without tools or medications. Setting broken bones is one thing, but your heart—"

"Shut your insufferable Federation mouth!" Tain bit scathingly, his voice almost completely inaudible amid the grumbling mutter of the waiting prisoners and the sounds of the others performing their necessary tasks. "Some oath of confidentiality, if you only abide by it until you're angry enough to grow incautious.  _You_!"

The last word rose to a sharp command, as Tain pointed a finger at a Cardassian just about to lower himself onto the third unit from the right. The man froze mid-air, exposed but clearly more frightened of Tain than humiliated.

"Get out of the way. That one's mine." Tain left Julian's side, striding for the toilet with the confidence of a man in the privacy of his home. The other Cardassian was left in the mortifying position of having to cover himself with his garments and move back into the line.

Tain beckoned to Julian as he sat. "Don't hang back like that. Get over here," he said. Julian didn't want to obey, but the press of the bodies behind him was growing. It was far too small a space for the people who needed to use it first thing in the morning, and no one else wanted to stand within three metres of Tain. Julian didn't know when he had last seen two men more wretchedly uncomfortable than the ones using the units on either side of him. Julian stepped forward into the vacant stretch of floor.

"What you need to do," said Tain; "is avoid situations that bring you to the attention of the guards. The Vorta is one thing. That's unavoidable now. But the Jem'Hadar will forget about you if you  _stay out of their way_."

Julian remembered the way Second Boran'itrex had glared at him, and the hatred in Talak'ran's voice as he grudgingly declared his debt discharged. He didn't think Tain was right about that, at all. But this was not the place to argue with the former head of the Obsidian Order.

"I'll try," Julian said tightly. What he was actually trying to do was close his ears to the sound of other men's water, because it made it still harder to hold his own. He had started to forget how much this vile-smelling room repulsed him, but he, like Kalenna, had been trying to time his visits with care. Julian had run into the same sort of outraged unease in the Sanctuary District, where the sanitation units had been fitted with long, irrigated troughs where several men could stand to relieve themselves at the same time.

Coming from a society of private, enclosed single stalls, Julian had been surprised by how deep his streak of modesty had run. He hadn't been trapped in the past long enough to inure himself to the embarrassment, but he'd believed he done so here. Actually standing and talking to Enabran Tain while he defecated, however, was another matter entirely. Julian kept his eyes on the seam of the ceiling, with its pattern of triangular seepage stains.

"You won't try," said Tain caustically. "You will do it, Doctor, or there will be consequences."

"There have already been consequences," Julian snapped acerbically. "Do you think I enjoyed spending the night like that?"

"And stop stargazing: you're not going to bore a hole in that bulkhead with the power of your piercing stare," Tain said sarcastically. "You're the one who was so anxious to get in here: take care of your business."

Julian lowered his gaze long enough to see that the unit on Tain's right had just been vacated, the abruptly whey-faced Cardassian who had been using it skittering hurriedly away. Julian glared at Tain.

"It's not my turn," he said tightly.

"It's your turn if I say it's your turn," Tain argued. He wafted a hand at the waiting tangle of men, as if he were a gul ensconced on the command chair of his warship instead of an old man who was, well, in a less-than-dignified position. "Any of  _you_  want to sit down next to me and have a little chat? I thought not. Go on, Doctor. See to that kidney of yours."

Julian's principles of equity and egalitarianism rebelled at the idea, but his bladder really did advise him that it was better not to wait. Clumsy in his haste and all too conscious of the resentful eyes on his back, he fumbled with the flap of his jumpsuit and did what he had to do. The sudden relief was dizzying, and he actually had to press his unoccupied palm to the wall behind the unit to brace himself. By the time he was rearranging his garments with fumbling fingers, Tain was already pushing his way to the front of the line for the sanitizer.

This time, Julian followed in his wake without resistance. He couldn't quite escape the feeling that he had left another small piece of his civility and humanity behind.

 _(fade_ )

Standing at attention with a stiff sternocleidomastoid was more painful that it probably should have been. Julian couldn't quite hold his head straight, and getting close enough to fool the sharp eyes of the Jem'Hadar required an exertion that rapidly progressed from discomfort to misery. Slow, shallow, rippling little cramps rolled up the outraged muscle at intervals, and when that happened, Julian found it difficult to draw breath without a burning in his throat, and even more difficult to resist the urge to massage the outraged muscles.

At least the count seemed to be progressing more quickly than usual. Deyos dropped it twice before reaching twenty, and then the numbers crept up towards one hundred with uncanny smoothness. It was when he reached seventy-eight that Julian noticed that there was something different about his escort this morning, however. The two lower-ranking Jem'Hadar usually rotated, taking turns at the tedious duty. But Ikat'ika and the Second almost always flanked the Vorta, one respectful pace behind. Today, the First was accompanied by the Third instead. Remembering Ikat'ika's cold threat to his second-in-command last night, Julian found himself grappling with mounting dread.

Had there been further strife between them? Had Ikat'ika taken disciplinary action? If he had, what did that mean for Julian's position? The Second loathed him, but if the human had been the cause of the death of a high-ranking and presumably respected officer, wouldn't that only give the others more incentive for vengeance?

Vengeance, like all other forms of personal code or independent thought, was something Starfleet Intelligence had long posited the Jem'Hadar were incapable of feeling or pursing. Julian knew differently. He had not accompanied the  _Defiant_  on the mission to the Iconian gateway, but he had sat in on the senior staff debriefing. What those Jem'Hadar had done to their Vorta when he had questioned their loyalty to the Founders could be described as nothing other than vengeance.

Deyos lingered at the head of the far line of prisoners, mocking the Cardassian on the very end. He didn't seem to have anything personal to say to the man, so he made snide remarks about his grimy and overgrown hair. It was a surreal scene, more like something out of a remote schoolyard corner than like the Vorta's usual incisive cruelty. Julian was just beginning to get the feeling that something was horribly amiss when the thunder of marching boots came from off behind his left shoulder.

He didn't dare to turn his head to look. None of the prisoners on his side of the atrium did. But every pair of eyes on the other side pivoted towards the ring, and a moment later, three Jem'Hadar came striding into Julian's line of sight. At their head was Second Boran'itrex.

Deyos paused in his badgering of the increasingly terrified Cardassian, and turned to the oncoming guards with an unctuous smile.

"Gentlemen!" he said pleasantly. "How can I help you this morning?"

Then he stepped away from the line to meet the Second. They exchanged a few muttered words that even Julian could not hear at this distance. Deyos's grin broadened enormously, so that he looked eerily like a dragon baring its fangs. He swept a long, languid look around the vaulted space, taking in the rigid lines of prisoners.

"Barracks 6!" he announced in a voice that filled the dome and seemed to echo off the rafters. "Prisoners from Barracks 6, step forward!"

Now Julian did turn his head — or rather, his whole torso, since his neck was locked and wouldn't turn to the right. He looked anxiously at Martok, standing stalwartly beside him, and then further down the line where Kalenna stood in front of Parvok. Tain was a little further down still, inconspicuous in the middle of the back row. The Breen was in the front row, amid those who would be counted in the one hundred fifty range.

"Step forward!" Deyos repeated. His eyes sought out Julian and he sounded almost glutted with delight as he called out; " _Doctor!_  You're in Barracks 6, aren't you? How delightful. I'd step forward if I were you. You certainly wouldn't prove very challenging to shoot, exposed like that right on the end."

Julian saw no choice. He took two long, deliberate strides out of the line. Beside him, perfectly in step, Martok did the same.

"And the others," called Deyos. Most of the prisoners seemed to know what was happen, but Julian didn't have a clue. He didn't dare to ask his Klingon cellmate, either. He doubted talking was any more permissible now than at any other time during the count, and the consequences wouldn't be visited on Julian alone.

Kalenna came forward, drawing Parvok with her. The Sub-Lieutenant looked nauseous with dread, but also desperately alarmed, as if he was holding himself back from a vociferous protestation of innocence.

"That  _can't_  be all of you!" Deyos declared. "We're almost at capacity, you know. Two vacant beds in one barracks would be  _wasteful._  Inefficient. All of you know the Dominion abhors waste and inefficiency."

"Tain," Martok muttered, almost without moving his lips. But Tain was coming forward, too, looking thunderously displeased. Julian wasn't worried about him. He was afraid for the Breen.

"Five," Deyos spat. He glared at the Second. "Who's missing? There are six prisoners in that barracks, and I know it."

"I do not know, Vorta," the Second said stiffly. He was scanning the five faces now aligned in a loose row of their own, near the centre of the atrium. Julian felt horribly exposed in every direction but his right. Martok was still standing so close to him that he could feel the radiant body heat rising from his armoured trunk.

"Find the sixth prisoner, and shoot him," said Deyos.

"No!" Julian said sharply. It went against all common sense, and it defied everything Tain had said to him just that morning. But Julian could not stand by while a person was executed for no greater crime than an inability to understand the languages of other species.

Deyos tilted his head sharply to the side. " _What_ did you say to me, human?" he demanded crisply.

Julian was already moving. Before Martok could seize him or Tain could wither him with a glare, he was breaking out of formation and hastening down the line of shocked and frightened faces at a brisk trot.

"It's not their fault," he called back over his shoulder as he went. "They don't know you've called for us. They can't understand what you're saying."

"They?" Deyos parroted. He looked from the Second to the First in an apery of bewilderment. "That is plural. The word is plural."

He sounded like generations of bigoted pedants, some of whom Julian had had the misfortune to meet in Earth's barbarous past. Julian ignored the Vorta. He had reached the middle of the line, and he took the Breen by the arm. They had been standing at perfect attention, and they stepped out at his coaxing as if mustering to a manoeuvre on a formal parade ground. Julian led them hurriedly to Kalenna's side, and then took up the spot to their right.

"There!" he called out to Deyos. "Now we are six!"

He couldn't resist phrasing it that way. A part of him, even in his weariness and privation and fear of whatever was happening now, was still the effervescent young man who couldn't resist a good barb, who laughed in the face of adversity, and who loved nothing quite so much as the heritage, music and literature of the country where he'd grown up. The allusion was lost on his captors, and almost certainly on all of his fellow prisoners. But Miles O'Brien would have understood it, and Miles O'Brien would have laughed, and in that moment, that was all Julian really cared about.

"So you are," said Deyos poisonously. He looked around him. "Prisoners! For your health and in the name of order, you are required to keep your sleeping areas neat and disciplined. Each morning, the Jem'Hadar graciously consent to inspect the facilities, to ensure these rules are obeyed. Barracks 6 has failed its morning inspection!"

A murmur of astonishment rippled down the lines of captives. Julian could not help looking down the scattered row of his cellmates. Kalenna cast an anxious, questioning glance at Parvok, who looked positively sick with incomprehension. From his other side, Tain was glaring at him. Martok, at the far end, stood motionless and stoic, almost as unreadable as the Breen. Julian didn't understand. Every morning, they straightened their cots and folded their bedding and returned General Martok's disused pallet to its frame. None of the tasks were onerous, only tediously pointless. It did not make sense that the barracks should fail inspection.

Deyos crossed to Martok, looking up at him. "Klingons, of course, are known to favour chaos and squalor," he spat. Getting no reaction, he moved on to Tain. He dragged his eyes up and down the Cardassian's broad body with contempt. "Perhaps the  _mighty_  Enabran Tain considers such chores beneath his dignity," he cooed. He barely spared Parvok a glance as he added; "I would expect better from a Romulan. And on many planets, females are tasked with keeping order in the household." This was directed at Kalenna, who had squared off to attention again as soon as he approached.

Deyos considered the Breen, but could not seem to think of anything at all to say to or about them. Last he turned on Julian.

"The Federation is full of pampered, spoiled creatures," he said. "Too lazy to make your bed in the morning, Doctor? And now all your  _friends_  must pay the price for your indolence."

He strode away purposefully, raising his voice again to address the assembled population. "If those so generously sheltered in Barracks 6 cannot care for their lodgings, they must be taught the value of a clean and ordered space!" he announced. "Take them away, Second, and see they learn their lesson."

Boran'itrex held high a beckoning hand, and suddenly half a dozen of the Jem'Hadar who had been on sentry duty at the various posts around the atrium converged. Each of them seized a prisoner by the arm. Martok tried to throw off the guard who came for him, but the creviced thumb closed on his elbow, digging in right where the ligaments were most fragile. The Klingon warrior's body stiffened, but he did not dare to fight. Julian didn't resist his own assailant. He was too dumbfounded and too blindly anxious. Everyone else seemed to know what was happening, but he had no idea what punishment awaited them. All he could make sense of was the vile, gleeful grin on the Vorta's face as he was forced into step behind the Breen, who followed the lead of their escort impassively. He had taken ten steps before he understood that they were being led back towards the ring, and past it to the door to their own barracks pod.

One by one, the six of them were flung back into the barracks. Julian was last, stumbling into a room he half expected to see in chaos: cots overturned, his cargo case opened, the medical supplies scattered. In a moment of incandescent terror, he searched the floor for the prying tool. But all was very much as the barracks was left every morning: bunks neatly made, bottles tucked beneath them, not so much as a corner of a blanket out of place. With one noted exception.

There was a pillow, taken from Parvok's cot and laid squarely in the centre of the bench nearest the door.

Flabbergasted beyond all prudence, Julian turned to the open door, beyond which the crowd of impassive Jem'Hadar leered in the corridor. The Second was standing in the threshold, disrupting the closing mechanism. While the others only wore their usual expressions of black, dispassionate bloodlust, Boran'itrex was smirking.

"That's all?" Julian snapped, motioning at the table. "One pillow?"

"Order," the Second said with obvious relish; "must be maintained. Contemplate that, human, while you languish here. If it pleases the Vorta, you will be permitted to join the other prisoners for tomorrow's count. Until then, consider how you defy the rules."

Then he stepped back and slapped the panel on the outer wall. The door slammed closed with its usual cacophony. The control panel let out the same chirping whine it played every night at curfew, and its display went dead.

Julian stared at it in dawning horror. "We're locked in?" he said hoarsely, desperately hoping someone would contradict him. "Until  _tomorrow's count_? Thirty-four hours?"

None of the others answered him. Martok strode to the back of the room and began to pace in a tight, agitated circle. Kalenna seemed to be trying to swallow something very large and painful. The Breen simply walked to their cot and sat down, palms resting on thighs.

It was Tain who spoke, and not to Julian. He whirled on Parvok, snatching up the limp, greasy little pillow and buffeting the Romulan viciously across the side of the head with it. It could not have hurt, but it was obviously meant to demean.

"You worthless, incompetent, castrated mudsnake!" Tain snarled. " _One duty_  you are assigned, so that the rest of us can work for your rescue, and you grow  _complacent_!"

"Stop it!" Kalenna cried, catching Tain's wrist as he drew back his arm, and wrenching the pillow from his fingers before he could strike Parvok again. The Cardassian turned on her, snarling, but Kalenna did not shrink away. "Parvok has never failed in his responsibility before!" she proclaimed resolutely, squaring her slender shoulders in the face of the blazing hatred in Tain's eyes. "I was with him when he left the barracks this morning, and all was as it should be! There must be some other explanation!"

"It is  _his_  pillow that is out of place, woman!" Tain snapped. "What other explanation do you need?"

Julian looked from this tense tableau, Kalenna holding back Tain while he seemed to be resisting the urge to bite the nose from her face, Parvok cowering as far into the corner as he could force himself, to Martok, wheeling into another turn of a circuit that was only about five paces in circumference. The air of Barracks 6 crackled with tension and agitation, and it was difficult to reason clearly, but Julian felt a crawling suspicion.

"We need to calm down," he said with a quiet firmness that forced all of them to listen to him. If he had tried to shout, he thought Tain would have simply roared over him. This way, he was compelled to be quiet if he wanted to make sense of Julian's words. As even Martok froze, raising a heavy head between suddenly hunched shoulders to look at him, Julian knew where he'd learned this technique. It wasn't something they had taught him in medical school, or during the courses on Command and discipline he'd taken during his officers' training. He had seen it modelled for him not in a classroom, but in his daily life.

It was one of Captain Sisko's techniques.

"We need to calm down," Julian repeated, finding an inordinate amount of courage in that realization. "It doesn't make sense that Parvok would leave his pillow on the bench. He's the one who picks up the slack for the rest of us when we're too tired or wounded or distracted or arrogant to make our own beds." He couldn't help shooting a caustic little glare at Tain as he said  _arrogant_ , but he forced himself to do another sweep of the room as he went on. "I think the guards moved it so they'd have an excuse to punish us."

"That's ridiculous!" scoffed Tain. He yanked his arm away from Kalenna and stalked to his cot, making sure to take a lunging step in Parvok's direction just so he could watch the Sub-Lieutenant shrink away. Kalenna moved at once to her subordinate's side, under the auspices of returning the pillow to its place. Julian read the protectiveness in her stance, however, and he thought Parvok did, too: he looked marginally less anxious as she took up a post near him.

"Is it?" Julian challenged, still in that measured, reasoned tone.

Tain curled his lip and flapped a hand at Kalenna. "You explain," he said.

"The Order of Things," Kalenna said to Julian. "If the prisoners obey, and prepare the barracks properly for inspection, tampering with it after the fact would contravene the Order of Things."

Julian wasn't sure the Second would be too bothered about that, after how he had been thwarted last night. But he wasn't about to start an argument. "It's also possible that someone else came into the barracks after you and Parvok left, and sabotaged us," he pointed out.

"Another prisoner?" Kalenna looked thoughtful.

Tain snorted. "Not likely. They wouldn't dare."

"A Cardassian wouldn't dare," said Julian. He nodded respectfully at Kalenna. "A Romulan probably wouldn't, either."

"A Romulan might, if there was something to be gained," Kalenna argued. She shook her head. "But they wouldn't stick their necks out just to be spiteful."

"It's an absurd suggestion," said Tain.

"It could be anyone," said Julian. "There are more species here than just Romulans and Cardassians. People from the Gamma Quadrant with no fear of either the Tal Shiar or the Obsidian Order. Anything is possible, and it's much more probable than Parvok getting reckless. He's more careful to avoid punishment than any of the rest of us. And he's competent."

"Competent," Tain scoffed.

"Still your tongue, Cardassian!" Kalenna said with a hauteur Julian had never heard from her before, especially not directed at the man to whom she professed to owe an unmeetable debt. "If you have criticisms of my unit, bring them against me, not my Sub-Lieutenant."

Tain laughed, holding his still substantial belly as he rocked with mirth. "Your  _unit_ , is it?" he chortled. "That sad little vole-faced underling?"

"Shut up!" Julian said sharply, forgetting his resolution to stay quiet and commanding. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is why they lock up the barracks that fail inspection. To turn us against each other. We've been in here all of five minutes, and we're already sniping. At this rate, we'll have clawed one another's eyes out by tomorrow morning."

And they hadn't even discussed the question of water. Julian still had half a litre left, untouched because he'd been locked out all night and occupied with Tain before the count this morning. How much did the others have? Not enough to keep all six of them hydrated for thirty-four hours, of that Julian had no doubt. He couldn't even bear to contemplate the meal they were going to miss.

"What we need to do," he said slowly; "is stay calm, and stop arguing. We can't do anything about our situation, but there's no reason to waste the day. Major, please make sure the corridor is clear. Tain, you have work to do. Parvok, would you please help me move the cot?"

"And I?" said Martok. They were the first words he had spoken since they had been dragged from the yard, and Julian found his eyes drawn to the warrior. There were beads of sweat upon his brow, and his chest was heaving in a way that could have very little to do with his brief, fruitless exertion. The mere knowledge that they were locked in was taking its toll on him already. Klingons did not adapt well to incarceration.

"You and I," said Julian; "are going to work on strengthening your fingers. As soon as Tain is in the wall, I'll join you. Have a seat."

Martok obeyed, stumping over to the inner bench and dropping down upon it with a clatter of chainmail. Kalenna was already at the door. Parvok was reluctant to get too near to Tain, but he was ready to step in to grab the foot of the cot at Julian's signal.

Only the Cardassian did not move. He sat on his bed, staring at Julian in scornful wonder, as if he could not conceive of how a person could survive three decades of life under the burden of such stupidity.

"What?" Julian demanded, more irascibly than he had meant to. His own nerves were hardly in a stable state. "You have some objection?"

"You're a damnable fool," spat Tain for the second time that day. "Go on: tell me the flaw in your plan."

Julian couldn't see a flaw. Inside the wall, Tain wouldn't be able to pick at the others until they snapped one by one. Work on the transmitter could continue uninterrupted. He could surely occupy Martok's mind for at least a couple of hours, working on his healing hand — and he'd find some other distraction when that one started to wear thin. Once everyone was calm, he could raise the question of water, and they were going to have to talk about the uncomfortable matter of what to do with their waste while they were cut off from the Dominion's amenities which, though spartan, were far better than nothing. He'd thought of everything.

"What if the guards come  _back_?" asked Tain. "To gloat, to look in on us, because they're bored, because they can? Or maybe one of them wanders by on his way to terrorize the residents of Barracks 3, say, and he just  _happens_  to glance in the window? What does he see?"

He'd see them quietly going about their daily affairs, Julian wanted to retort. And then he understood. In an awful, blinding moment of clarity, he understood.

The guard would see five prisoners, in a sealed room where six had been locked in.

Julian felt his shoulders sag. His headache, a constant low-grade presence born of stress, fatigue, dehydration, perpetual hunger and the lingering effects of his untreated concussions, flared and began to pulse mercilessly through his cranium. He felt impossibly weary, and it was all he could to to keep from sinking to the floor where he stood, just so he could bury his face in his hands.

" _Exactly_ ," sneered Tain, his voice dripping scorn. "Whatever you've done to bring this down upon us, Doctor, it's going to cost us a day's work. It's going to cost us a day's freedom. I hope you're proud of yourself."

Julian couldn't speak. There was nothing he could say. Apparently there was nothing anyone else could say, either. He couldn't raise his eyes to look at them. He was too weighed down by the grimness of their situation and the horror of his own carelessness. But he heard them, and their hushed, shallow breathing was deafening. Kalenna, Martok, Parvok: all were silent.

Enabran Tain had gotten the last word.

 _(fade to black_ )

* * *

 

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**sternocleidomastoid:** a large superficial (exterior) muscle supporting the neck, responsible in part for rotation and flexion.


	53. Teaser: Bedside Manner

_Note: Apologies for the slow update and the false alert. It's been a rough week. Enjoy!_

**Part X, Teaser: Bedside Manner**

While slipping gently into slumber was one of Odo's favourite parts of his new routine, waking up was always a gamble. Some days, he rose to consciousness with a languid ease that reminded him in a peculiar way of taking shape again after a luxuriant regeneration cycle — his mind, instead of his body, being the part of him that shifted from fluid to tangible. Other days, he overslept, and the computer's wake-up call jerked him out of a dream with jarring rapidity.

Dreams were strange, and Odo still didn't know what to make of them. Sometimes they were marvellous, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes simply mystifying. One thing Odo had learned, however, was that when they were interrupted, it was never pleasant. Waking abruptly from a dream left him groggy, irascible, and reluctant to face the day.

While that wasn't the case this morning, Odo regretted waking as soon as he tried to roll over. A sharp, tingling, horrible sensation ripped through his back and down into his left leg. For a moment, it robbed him of breath.

There were many sensations he'd had to grow accustomed to as a solid. Some, like a sense of smell, were unpredictable but marvellous. Others, like the need to eliminate waste products, were simply bizarre. But pain was horrifying. Even small quantities of pain startled, frightened, and unsettled him. Odo prided himself on his stoicism, and he had borne up well under most of the discomforts and indignities of acclimating to life as a Solid. Pain, however, shook his confidence in his adaptability. He didn't understand how people could live their whole lives like this, vulnerable to such brutal stimuli. And as he dragged himself out of bed despite the stabbing fire in his spine, Odo wasn't quite sure he wanted to try.

He would never have admitted these fleeting thoughts to anyone. Not to Captain Sisko, who made a point of checking in on him periodically to ascertain how Odo was coping even half a year after the Great Link had rendered their judgement and administered his punishment. Not to Doctor Bashir, who according to protocol was the person to whom such burdens were supposed to be brought. Certainly not to Dax or O'Brien or Worf. There had been a time when Odo might have tried to go to Nerys — to  _Major Kira_ — when he needed consolation and support. But Kira had her own life now, busy with her relationship with First Minister Shakaar and with her pregnancy, which was drawing to an end. And if Odo was to be completely honest, he'd never actually succeeded in turning to her, had he?

Sometimes, he toyed with the idea of reaching out to Lwaxana Troi. Of all the people Odo had known over the years, the Betazoid ambassador was the only one one to whom he had vocalized some measure of his inner turmoil. That had been before his exile from the Link, and his burdens in those days had been different, but Odo remembered how he had been able to open up to Lwaxana about things he had thought humanoids incapable of understanding. More remarkable was the way in which her insights and her counsel had consoled him. For all her artful projection of blissful frivolity, she was a woman of insight and substance, and Odo would have welcomed her friendship now.

He supposed he could have sought it. She was only a subspace call away, once again living on Betazed with her baby boy, now several months old. Odo knew she would be glad to hear from him, and that she'd be more than happy to listen. Yet he could not quite bring himself to contact her. True, she was still technically his wife: the Tavnian marriage that had given Odo custody of Lwaxana's unborn child was not safely be dissolved for some months yet. But Lwaxana had her own life, and she didn't need to be troubled with the morose musings of a former Changeling.

Odo's morning routine, already arduous in comparison to what he had been used to before he was trapped in solid form, was a marathon of misery this morning. The simplest tasks were complicated by the pain in his back. Sitting to perform his now-permanent body's excretory function sent tingling arcs of misery into his flank and hip and thigh. At least the process of passing the stool was substantially easier than it had been before Doctor Bashir's advice about the prune juice. In the old days, when Odo had been curious about and a little envious of his friends' need for food and drink, he had never given much thought to what happened to it after it was eaten. He hadn't enjoyed the process of finding out.

He didn't linger in the sonic shower: standing still was almost as agonizing as sitting. He climbed into his uniform in slow, stilted stages, and ate his breakfast — a hard-boiled egg and buttered mapa toast — while perched on the edge of his chair. Odo still wasn't used to all the furniture that had replaced his shape-shifting inspiration pieces. He didn't like change, and the sheer volume of the changes he had made over the last few months still left him irritable and uncomfortable. It was almost a relief to haul himself excruciatingly to his feet again and to leave his quarters behind.

Ordinarily, Odo took the long route to the Promenade. He would walk to the nearest spoke bridge, or even the next one over, taking the opportunity to patrol a section of the Habitat Ring and to be seen as a visible authority. It wasn't a particularly arduous walk, but it was more than he felt up to today. Every step was agony, and so he made for the turbolift instead. Once inside, he could lean against the wall and take some of the weight off of his leg. He sincerely hoped no one else would board, and as the turbolift hummed through the station's network of shafts, Odo felt tangible relief. He didn't want to be seen to be weak, but it was also good to rest for a couple of minutes.

He was standing erect again when the turbolift halted, and the doors slid open to reveal the bright colours and early morning traffic on the Promenade. Odo tried to step out with his usual forceful stride, but that first step was entirely too painful. It stole his breath and he clutched at the wall behind him, fighting to stay upright. He was aware the pain was not actually intense enough to justify such a reaction, but it was such an alien sensation that he could not help succumbing to it, even just for a few seconds. He tried to steady himself, but he seemed to be tottering.

And then a firm hand closed on his elbow, bracing him up and giving him the support he needed to catch his breath, lock his knees, and get his feet aligned again. Odo turned his head cautiously, wary of sending a pulse of pain into his spine from the other side, and scowled as he saw who had stepped up to help him. He was face-to-face with Garak.

The Cardassian was smiling broadly. "Good morning, Constable," he said. "I trust you're having a pleasant day so far?"

Odo tried to shrug off the man's grasp, but Garak was incorrigible and Odo didn't want to move too forcefully. "Leave me alone, Garak," the Constable growled. "I don't need your assistance."

"I never said you did!" Garak breathed, looking scandalized at the very thought. "I was just curious."

"Curious? About what?" asked Odo.

Garak shifted his fingers so that they no longer cupped the other man's elbow supportively, but pinched the fabric of his sleeve instead. He rolled a fold between fingers and thumb. "About how you've been caring for your uniform, of course. The cleaning reprocessors can be hard on fine cloth, you know, and Inkarian wool is particularly temperamental."

It was a pretext, but Odo appreciated it. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "And?" he challenged.

"And I'm happy to say that you've done an excellent job," said Garak. "It's practically pristine. I'm very pleased. It's some of my best work, you know, that uniform. Alterations on an  _extremely_  tight schedule, and it fits you like a glove."

"Hmph." Odo tilted his head back slightly in acknowledgment. He had appreciated Garak's willingness to make the uniform fit him properly. Completely unused to the need for clothing, he would have been absolutely miserable in an ill-fitting standard-issue garment. He knew Garak had benefited as well, with twenty-six hours' grace to get his affairs in order before surrendering to Odo's custody for his six-month sentence for sabotage and assault. That was the official charge, anyhow.

Captain Sisko had deliberated for hours before settling on it, consulting closely with Commander Worf, with Odo, and with Commander Dax. In the end, he had opted to offer Garak a plea bargain under the Bajoran judicial system, rather than involve Starfleet in what would have likely become an onerous and drawn-out legal process. Odo had been surprised to find that he agreed with the Captain's judgement. He supposed it didn't speak well of his loyalty to his people that, in the light of their condemnation of his own crime, he was not confounded by Garak's attempt to attack the Founders' homeworld and devastate the Link. Odo was glad that he had failed, but he could not fault him for trying. He had supported Garak's petition for early release; not entirely, as the Cardassian had been led to believe, because Odo was tired of his perpetual presence in the holding cell.

"You know, I've been thinking," Garak mused. "It's about time you and I resumed our breakfasts together. I feel like I hardly see you anymore, now I'm not conveniently ensconced in your place of work."

Odo's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "I'd have thought you would appreciate your freedom," he said.

"Oh, I  _do_ ," Garak drawled, smiling broadly. "But the fact is, Constable, you make a most… scintillating partner in conversation. I've come to miss our talks."

They had first taken to meeting for breakfast once a week after the improbable events surrounding the loss of the joint Cardassian and Romulan fleet almost two years ago. Then, Garak had done all the eating, while Odo simulated a beverage with his morphogenic capabilities. Odo had continued the tradition while Garak was in the cell, joining him on Thursdays to share a meal. It was a violation of protocol, and probably inadvisable. But it had made Odo's early weeks as a solid a little more bearable, and in those days he had needed every little pleasure he could get. It wasn't that he  _enjoyed_  Garak's company, but rather that the former Obsidian Order operative always provided enigmatic conversation. He had done the same thing onboard the  _Defiant_ , when Odo had been in agony because of the Founders' virus. It was a strange gesture, and Odo couldn't quite call it kindness, but he appreciated it nonetheless.

"That would be… welcome," he said stiffly.

Garak's smile broadened. "Thursday, then? 0700 in the Replimat?"

"Hmph," Odo agreed with a tacit little nod. "Now be about your business. I have to get to work."

"Of course," Garak said graciously. "Perhaps you should look in on the Infirmary, just to make sure there's been no looting overnight?"

"Looting?" Odo's brow furrowed. These days, he felt that expression in a way he hadn't in the old days. He could feel the unnatural crispness of it, so unlike the way the muscles of the rest of his body worked. His face, the constant reminder of what he had been and all he had lost, didn't move quite like a real humanoid face. It felt more natural now than it had before the mission to Ty'Gokor to uncover the Changeling who had replaced General Martok. In removing the surgical prostheses that had made their infiltration of the Order of the Bat'leth possible, Doctor Bashir had created new nerve pathways and provided better vascularization than the Founders had left for Odo. Still, as much as Odo appreciated its familiarity, it was not a natural face, and he suspected it did not really feel like one.

Garak shrugged. "It's possible, isn't it? We live in interesting times."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Odo groused, before realizing that he actually did. Garak didn't believe there had been looting in the Infirmary: it was his way of suggesting that Odo go to see Doctor Bashir. Garak wasn't about to admit he had witnessed Odo's pain, any more than he had admitted to helping him catch his balance. But in his own strange way, he cared enough to make the suggestion obliquely, to spare both their pride. "But it cannot hurt to check."

"Precisely," Garak agreed. He patted Odo's shoulder once, lightly and very briefly. "Good day, Constable. I'll see you on Thursday."

Odo grunted his agreement as Garak strolled off towards his shop. He couldn't help but envy the man's smooth gait, all the more so when he resumed his own perambulation and found himself hobbling rigidly towards the clearly marked Infirmary doors. They slid open to admit him, and he could not suppress a groan as he approached. Nor could he resist the urge to grip the doorpost to brace himself against the pain of the next step.

"Good morning, Constable!" Doctor Bashir said with bracing affability. Odo was relieved that it was he, and not one of the nurses, who was out front at the moment. He didn't think he could have explained his situation to more than one person. "And what can I do for you… today?"

There was a slight pause before the word, and it made Odo uncomfortable. He knew he had made more than his fair share of visits to the Infirmary over the last few months, and that some of the nurses — Buhler and Hortak in particular — had taken to whispering that he was a hypochondriac. But Doctor Bashir never seemed to mind. He couldn't possibly have personal insight into what it was like to have your very nature altered overnight, but since Odo's transformation he had often reassured him that there was a lot to get used to about living in a solid body. He had been supportive and patient every step of the way, and Odo had wondered how long it would take that tolerance to wear thin. Apparently, today was the day.

But he was in too much pain to turn around and walk away. He tried another tactic that often helped him feel less at odds with those around him. With grim exasperation that conveyed he was just as sick of this as Bashir evidently was, he groused; "It's my back."

Bashir set down the PADD he had been carrying on the computer's data transfer surface, and tapped the controls to order a download. "Let's take a look," he said, in a good-naturedly long-suffering tone. Now that Odo thought about it, he'd used a similar inflection towards the end of their consultation last week, just before recommending the prune juice.

He forced himself to hobble to the biobed, avoiding Bashir's eyes as he explained. "It happened this morning when I got out of bed," he said.

Bashir opened his tricorder and hummed thoughtfully as Odo hoisted himself onto the examination surface. The effort was agonizing, and he could not suppress a sharp moan of agony. How was it possible for a body to contain this much pain?

"I have Alvanian spine mites, don't I?" Odo said bitterly. He couldn't seem to help concocting worst-case scenarios when it came to his complex and obviously faulty new body.

"Actually…" Bashir began, but Odo was warming to the scenario.

"I'll be in pain for the rest of my life…" he muttered.

"Odo," Bashir said. Now he didn't sound impatient, only firmly reassuring and compassionate. He blinked to punctuate his patient's name before adding, almost gently; "You have a pinched nerve."

Odo looked up at him in surprise. "Really?" he said flatly. It sounded like such a little thing, to be causing this kind of torture.

"It comes from bad posture," Bashir said.

Now Odo bristled. Or he would have done, except that trying to thrust out his chin awoke another twinge in his back. "Me? Ridiculous!" he declared. He prided himself on his posture, and the young doctor was a notorious sloucher. Odo had often seen him curled over a PADD at a table in Quarks, his back contorted like the neck of a Bajoran mandolin. "You've never seen anyone sit so straight."

"Exactly," Bashir said, a note of satisfaction in his voice. "You carry yourself too rigidly."

There was something about the way he said that, almost superciliously, that reminded Odo of Doctor Mora and his constant criticism of Odo's morphogenic capabilities.  _If you try a little harder, surely you can manage a more convincing ear. Look at the details. You're not making a very convincing facsimile. Try again_.

Odo tried to quash that thought. Now  _he_  was the one who was being ridiculous. Doctor Bashir wasn't criticizing him for being an unconvincing solid. He was just offering a medical opinion, as obnoxious as that opinion might be.

Odo gave him a guarded look. "This is how I've always carried myself," he said.

"You haven't  _always_  had a spinal column," Doctor Bashir said, wagging a finger pensively. With a strange, slightly strained lightness, he expounded on that as he moved around the foot of the bed and picked up a hypospray from the instrument tray. "You're not a Changeling anymore. Now that you're a humanoid, you have to learn to relax."

Odo crossed his arms over his chest, glaring at the door. "Well, that's what you said last week," he grumbled reluctantly.

"And?" Bashir was loading a cartridge into the instrument now. As he turned back to the bed, Odo was forced to admit the truth.

"And it helped," he muttered. "That and the prune juice."

Bashir was smirking, and again, Odo felt the urge to lash out at him. But another part of his brain was uneasy. Bashir liked to joke with his patients to put them at ease; he called it "bedside manner" and claimed it was something doctors perfected with diligent practice. But he was usually quicker to notice when his jokes failed to put a patient at ease. He seemed to find Odo's situation amusing in some way, and Odo resented it — but it was also rather unlike him. Last month when Odo had come in with the dry sinuses, there had been no teasing, and certainly no smugness. Doctor Bashir had simply made pleasant conversation about Odo's work and his own travel plans for the upcoming burn treatment conference while he took a couple of scans, peered up Odo's nose with a bright light, and suggested new settings for the humidity controls in his quarters.

"There. You see?" he said pointedly, resting his hand on Odo's shoulder while the other applied the hypo to his back. There was a hiss, a feeling of a bubble of pressure moving through skin and muscle, and instant release.

"Ah-huh," Odo sighed, eyes closing in gratitude. As the analgesic made his pain dissolve into normalcy, he found he couldn't bear a grudge against the physician, regardless of his attitude.

"I know what I"m talking about," Bashir said, smiling again. This time, it was a kindly smile, or so it seemed to Odo.

Maybe his pain had been altering his perceptions of Bashir's behaviour? He had to be on the lookout for things like that: solid bodies had an inordinate amount of influence over the emotional state of their owners. When he was hungry, for instance, Odo found he had a remarkably low tolerance for stupidity and incompetence — even by his usual standards.

"Back trouble?" This voice, now, was undeniably smug. Odo looked up to see Quark standing by the replicator. He hadn't heard the door open. He hadn't noticed Nurse Hortak coming out from the back of the Infirmary, either, but she was sitting at the computer terminal on the far side of the room. The lapse in his observational skills irritated Odo even more than the Ferengi bartender's presence, and it did seem to confirm his suspicion about his perspective on Bashir's behaviour: pain, apparently, was colossally distracting.

"It's none of your concern, Quark," Odo said sourly.

The Ferengi nodded knowingly. "Bad posture," he opined sagely.

"Will you get out of here?" Odo snapped. Next time, he would have to ask to be seen in one of the private rooms. He would have done so this morning, if he hadn't been eager to avoid walking any farther than absolutely necessary. He was a little bit envious of Nurse Hortak, who rose smoothly at that moment and strode away. Odo sincerely hoped that the injection would allow him to do the same. It certainly felt like it might.

"What you need is a good stretching regimen," Doctor Bashir said, as if he hadn't even noticed the intruder. "Worf's morning exercise class should be just the thing." He waggled the hypospray briefly before moving to put it away.

"Forget that," Quark scoffed. "I've got a holosuite program that'll take care of it." Bashir, passing him, stopped a little too close to the Ferengi. Humans liked a certain degree of personal space, and in Odo's experience, it was usually about fifty centimetres. Bashir had left less than half that. Quark didn't seem to mind. He bared his teeth in pleasure as he said, "Three Orion slave girls strap you—"

" _Qua-ark…_ " Odo groaned irately. They both looked at him, almost shoulder-to-shoulder. Much too close. Odo was glad Bashir never violated  _his_  personal space like that.

The Doctor moved off with a grin, and Quark shrugged, waving a hand. "Go ahead — suffer," he drawled.

"What do you  _want_?" Odo demanded, exasperated. Bashir slid into the chair the nurse had vacated, probably to update Odo's now extensive medical file.

Quark stepped nearer, launching into his storytelling voice. "A Yridian I've been dealing with sold me something that might interest you."

Odo scoffed. "I don't think so."

"You don't even know what it is," Quark muttered, clearly pleased with himself.

"I know I don't want it," said Odo. He just wanted this perennial nuisance to leave the Infirmary so that he could ask Bashir a couple more questions before getting on with his workday. He was sick of the sight of the Infirmary, and he hated feeling like an invalid — and a nuisance.

"In that case," said Quark; "can you tell me how to get in touch with the Founders? I know  _they'll_ want it."

If Odo could have ignited Quark with his glare, they'd have need of the station's fire suppression system in about two and a half seconds. "What are you talking about?" he growled.

From behind his back, Quark produced a lantern-like canister with a bluish form inside. It looked crystallized and worryingly unhealthy, but Odo recognized it immediately. He rose to his feet rapidly, transfixed. A distant, buried part of his mind noted that the motion came without pain, and reflected that Doctor Bashir was a miracle worker. All the rest of Odo's consciousness was focused on the form inside the exotic container.

A Changeling. An infant Changeling. One of his own people, tiny and vulnerable and obviously ailing. Feeling the inexorable need to shelter and protect it, he raised both hands to pluck the bottle from Quark's irresponsible hand.

"It's a Changeling," Quark whispered, completely unnecessarily. Odo exhaled a low sigh of wonder. "Or it was, anyway. Since it's dead, I'll let you have it for five slips of latinum."

"It's not dead," Odo said intensely, studying the crystalline growths and wishing for his former visual acuity. Real eyes just were not quite as sharp as their morphogenic equivalent.

"In that case, make it ten," Quark murmured briskly.

"It's sick," Odo said worriedly. He didn't know what was wrong, and since he could no longer Link with the little one, there was no way for him to find out.

"Eight… and we'll call it even," said Quark, clearly enjoying the haggling.

"Aahh…" Odo agreed, nodding slightly. He didn't look at the Ferengi. It was almost as if Quark had faded into fog. He was still there, but somehow distant. Only the Changeling mattered now.

Quark produced one of his ledger pads and keyed in the price. He took Odo's hand and pressed his thumb bodily to the scanner. "It's a pleasure doing business with you," he said, and then strode off and out of Odo's periphery.

Still transfixed, he was only distantly aware of Doctor Bashir's cautious approach. He, too, took a moment to stare in awe before saying cautiously, "If that is a Changeling, maybe we should get it into a security field."

"That won't be necessary," Odo murmured, once again cupping the canister with both hands. He felt like he was holding the greatest treasure in the universe in his fingers, and he was irrationally afraid he might drop it. After all these months, more than half a year, so bitterly alone, he was at last in the presence of one of his own people again. More miraculous still, one of his own people who did not despise him for what he had done to the Changeling who had tried to destroy his friends. One who had no idea of who he was, or what he had been, or even what it itself might be. It was miraculous.

"But if it gets out of that container, it could be dangerous," Bashir pressed. It was such a quintessentially Solid thing to say: a statement of reflexive distrust of the unknown. At another time, it might have irritated Odo. Just now, he barely registered it. He certainly didn't pause to wonder when Bashir had suddenly become so closed-minded and paranoid.

He shook his head slowly. "It's not going anywhere, Doctor," he said. "It doesn't know how. It's just a baby…"

Odo expected the Doctor to move off, or maybe to ask another question. Instead, Bashir reached out almost possessively, putting his own hand around the throat of the canister.

"It's not well," he said intently. When Odo glanced at him in mild surprise, Bashir shrugged one shoulder. "That's what you said to Quark, isn't it? Come on: we need to get it out of this thing. If I can just…" He grimaced fleetingly, something Odo probably would not even have noticed without the eyes of an experienced investigator. Bashir composed himself almost immediately. "If I can just get it into my scanner," he said with curious deliberateness; "we can find out what's wrong, and determine what steps we need to take to treat it."

"Good idea," Odo said firmly. He didn't want to let go of the little Changeling, but Bashir didn't seem to want to, either. And he was the doctor. He'd helped Odo through some very difficult things, the Founders' virus foremost among them. If anyone could help, it was him. Odo yielded his grip.

Bashir turned instantly on his heel, cupping his other hand underneath the container as if he, too, feared he might drop it. He moved swiftly around the corner to his main workstation.

"The visible crystallization means —  _implies_  — that it can't relax into a purely morphogenic state," Bashir said. He was inspecting the container now, trying to unscrew the domed top. It didn't seem to want to budge. "There's no seam… how did they get it in here?" Bashir muttered, studying the base. With a noise of exasperation, he abandoned the young Changeling on the desktop and ran for his instrument tray.

Odo had seen the Doctor in action before, when lives were at risk. One of their very first interactions had been in a life-or-death manoeuvre to save a woman with a laceration on her throat. Odo, who had always been uncomfortable with Solids' blood, had tried to shy away when pressed into service as a medical aide. Bashir had held him fast with firm words and an aura of command quite at odds with what had been in those days a stammering flightiness in most social situations. In spite of himself, Odo had been impressed by the young man's calm capability under fire. He was moving like that now: swift, purposeful, and fully invested in the task at hand and the life at stake.

Odo felt a warm surge of gratitude towards him. Bashir's earlier smugness, if it had been real and not merely a figment of Odo's pain-addled imagination, didn't matter now. He was trying to help the little Changeling, and doing so with the same dedication he applied to all his patients. All things considered, that was a tremendous gift.

He was back now, with a laser scalpel in one hand and a cylindrical piece of laboratory glassware in the other. He set down the latter, and adjusted the settings on the former.

"What are you going to do?" Odo said worriedly, eyeing the instrument.

"Don't worry, Odo," Bashir said, with such quiet earnest that the Constable was quite disarmed. "The Changeling is in good hands. I won't harm it."

Federation doctors took an oath to that effect, Odo remembered. Still, he found himself holding his breath as Bashir sliced through each of the metal struts surrounding the panes of glass. To his astonishment, the laser scalpel proved equal to a task it could not possibly have been designed to perform. There were no sparks, just a whiff of melting alloy. Then Bashir lifted the top off the canister.

"There!" he said. He picked up the container with the Changeling in one hand, and the glass cylinder in the other.

"Careful," Odo said hastily. "You've got to—"

But Bashir had already tipped the empty vessel seventy degrees. Very gently, he eased the other onto its side, pouring the blue, gelatinous body of the ailing infant into the sterile case. There was more of it than Odo had been able to see: the lower panes of the canister were opaque. He watched in wonder as Bashir slowly righted one container while tipping the other farther until the last trailing tail of goo slithered free.

"There," the Doctor sighed. He cast aside the empty container without a glance, and held the filled cylinder up to the light. "Poor thing," he murmured. Then he looked at Odo. "I should take it into the back. Wait here."

Odo frowned, reluctant to let this precious cargo out of his sight even for a moment. "I'll come with you," he said. "I don't want… that is, I'm the nearest thing it has to one of its own kind, and I don't want it to feel abandoned. I… I know what that feels like."

Bashir regarded him solemnly, almost sadly. "I suppose you do," he said. He closed his eyes briefly, and Odo thought he sighed ever so slightly. "Very well. We'll do it the long way. Here, hold it while I prepare the scanner."

Odo didn't ask what Bashir meant by  _the long way_. He assumed it was a reference to some other piece of equipment elsewhere in the Infirmary, presumably in one of the rooms where the public and patients' loved ones — for he supposed that's what he was, now — weren't allowed. Bashir disappeared briefly around the corner, and came back wheeling a columnar device. He set it up in the curve of his desk, and activated it. While he made adjustments to the settings, he nodded at the glowing pillar in its centre.

"Set it down there, please," he said. "I'm going to have to run a series of comprehensive scans." He watched avidly as Odo obeyed, almost as transfixed by the Changeling as Odo himself. Then he seemed taken by a sudden thought. Odo saw shrewd realization followed by a flicker of annoyance. But it was with professional certainty that Bashir said; "We should get Captain Sisko down here. He'll want to know there's a Changeling on the station."

"I suppose you're right," Odo muttered. In truth, though, he found the suggestion less annoying than he otherwise might have done. If anyone on Deep Space Nine could appreciate the significance of this discovery, it was Captain Sisko. He was an explorer at heart, and Odo had often witnessed the awe with which Sisko greeted new life. It didn't get much newer than an untried infant, unaware of the nature of its own existence or the world around it.

Bashir was at the computer now, keying in rapid commands. There was a manic determination to his movements, and he kept stealing watchful glances at the Changeling. Odo tapped his combadge.

"Odo to Sisko," he said.

"Sisko here. How can I help you, Constable?" the Captain's pleasant voice asked.

Odo looked at the Changeling again. He didn't want to explain over the comm, when he couldn't be sure who might be near enough to the Captain to overhear. "Can you come down to the Infirmary?" he said instead. "There's something here you really ought to see…"

( _fade to black_ )


	54. An Equal Share

**Part X, Act I: An Equal Share**

Julian sat sideways on the bench nearest his cot, waiting while the others gathered what remained of their water rations. Martok handed his canteen off first, grimly. Julian rocked it, gauging the weight with a practiced hand. He remembered how he had once struggled to estimate how much was left in one of the metal bottles. The fact that he knew with almost scientific precision that he held between three hundred and three hundred and fifty millilitres of water was a grim reminder not only of how long he had been here, to become so intimately familiar with the weight of the vessels, but how much of his cognitive energy was eaten up every day tracking exactly how much water he had in his possession.

 _Eight hundred twenty-five millilitres, give or take_ , he thought. He knew it was pointless to divvy it up in his mind now, with only two bottles in his possession, but he did it anyway. A little more than half a cup each. The thought filled Julian with nauseous anxiety, even though he understood that their situation could not possibly be quite  _that_  grim. Still, it was with disproportionate urgency that he reached for the bottle Kalenna held out to him. He was surprised by the heft of it, and he looked up at her questioningly.

She shrugged one shoulder. "It isn't full," she said regretfully.

It was full enough. It doubled the supply in front of Julian. He offered the Major a tiny twitch of a smile, but he was interrupted before he could speak by a dull  _clang_  from the far corner of the room. Parvok stiffened as he caught his bottle again. His hands were shaking, and his shoulders were hunched as if in anticipation of a blow. Tain snorted in disgust, and Kalenna pressed her lips together worriedly.

Julian had twisted towards his left hip to look at the Sub-Lieutenant. Before he could turn back to a more natural position, a shadow fell across his shoulder. The Breen held out their bottle, wordless but resolved. Julian took it, nodding silent thanks and hoping — as he always did when trying to communicate with his silent cellmate — that the body language so intrinsic to his own species' interpersonal interactions were decipherable to the Breen.

The bottle was lighter than he would have liked: Julian estimated that it held four hundred millilitres. That brought them to just over two litres, as Parvok got unsteadily to his feet and yielded his own portion. He had less left even than Martok: two hundred millilitres at the outside. Still, Julian thanked him. He knew Parvok needed affirmation right now, particularly in the wake of Tain's accusations.

Only the aged Cardassian was left. Julian twisted in the other direction, bracing his palm on the bench behind himself for leverage. Tain was pretending not to watch him, eyes focused instead at the corner of the ceiling over Julian's caught. He wasn't fooled for a moment.

"Would you care to make a contribution?" Julian asked, as offhandedly as he could. He was trying not to think too hard about how little water they had to go around, and how wretchedly dehydrated they would all be by tomorrow's ration call. He could not help hoping that Tain, like Kalenna, had a substantial surplus from yesterday's rations. Even half a litre more would give them each a couple of extra mouthfuls.

Tain blinked lazily, finally pivoting his eyes to look at the human. "Not particularly," he said boredly.

Kalenna made a noise of low disgust. "We are all in the same predicament here, Tain," she said. "If we don't pool our resources, everyone will suffer."

" _Pool our resources_ ," Tain mocked. "I see Federation dogma is like Anchilles fever: highly contagious and most often deadly."

Julian did not point out that it had been Kalenna who had first implemented this policy for his sake, when he had been deprived of his water ration as punishment for correcting Deyos's count. Then, of course, it had been a matter of a small sacrifice by those with a full ration to spare the man who had nothing. This was a situation of far greater scarcity.

"It is the only way to ensure an equal distribution of resources," Kalenna said, with the tone of one lecturing an obstreperous trainee. "More importantly, it will ensure the continued cohesion of the unit."

Tain laughed. "Do you delude yourself into thinking we're  _unified_?" he mocked. He jabbed a finger at Parvok, then at Julian. "He fails us with his incompetence.  _He_  endangers us all by cozying up to the Jem'Hadar. The Klingon cares more for his honour than for the resources he wastes when we have to tend his injuries after every stubborn bout. And as for the tin apparition over there—" He waved at the Breen, once more seated, and snorted contemptuously. "Some  _unit_  you have, Major."

Martok growled. He rounded the table with four purposeful, stumping strides. "You are clever, Tain, but you are without honour," he spat. "This is no day for your selfishness! Yield your bottle, or I will take it."

Tain curled his lip. "No," he said with relish.

For a moment, the warrior looked like he wanted to strike Tain. Julian knew he would have to try to intervene if Martok tried it: the only way they were going to survive this ordeal was by refusing to turn on one another. Then with a dismissive hiss, Martok dropped to one knee and reached under the bed, leaning one armoured shoulder aggressively against Tain's knees. The Cardassian looked down in studied disinterest at the intrusion into his personal space, but seemed otherwise completely unaffected.

Martok brought out one of the canteens, shook it and scowled. He flung it wrathfully away, and it bounced off the back wall of the barracks with a dull  _bong_. It was empty. He fished farther under the cot, groping for the other one. Julian saw the look of astonished aggravation on the General's face as his fingers closed on the other bottle, and knew what he was going to say before he spoke.

"Empty?" Martok snarled, sitting back on his booted heel and glaring up at Tain. "You have no water left?"

Tain was smirking. Martok shot to his feet with such rapidity that only the grunt of effort betrayed what the movement cost his battered body. He was brandishing Tain's second bottle, incredulity and anger knotting his features.

"You drank all you had, just to keep from contributing your share?" the Klingon roared. "Of all the spiteful, petty, small-minded — you are without honour!"

Tain's grin only broadened. Parvok, a moment ago shocked by the vehemence of the General's wrath, was now seething. Kalenna looked horrified.

"No," Julian said softly. "He didn't."

All of them looked at him. All but Tain, who was still sneering indifferently up at the Klingon.

Julian shook his head. "He hasn't touched his bottles since we were locked in here. He didn't know we'd be stuck in here today. He didn't drink it out of spite: he must have finished his ration before he came out to wake me."

Kalenna's expression was thunderous. "Which means he knew even then what awaited us this morning," she said. She locked burning eyes on Tain. "You accused Parvok of neglecting his duty," she said. "You accused the Doctor, noble man though he is, of inciting the Jem'Hadar or other prisoners to entrap us. While all the time it was  _you_. You crept in here after the Sub-Lieutenant and I departed, and  _you_  moved the pillow!"

Tain looked at her languidly, and bared his teeth in a grin. "If you want to believe that, I can't stop you," he drawled.

" _No_ ," said Julian again. He was thinking back, trying to remember if he had ever observed Tain drinking in the morning. He certainly didn't wait, like all the rest of them, until the very last minute before ration call to drain the last mouthfuls from his bottles. "Tain was with me, from when the three of you woke me in the corridor, until we took our places for the count. He couldn't have detoured back here to move the pillow."

"Then one of his operatives did it!" cried Parvok. "He's always boasting that he still has power none of us can imagine. He ordered one of them to come in here and see to it we failed the inspection."

Tain looked almost impressed by the Romulan's mettle.

"That's not impossible," Julian allowed; "but I don't believe it. This is costing us a day's work on the transmitter. None of us are more invested in that work than Tain is. It's all he thinks about, and not just because of the prospect for escape. He's obsessed."

"Preposterous," Tain scoffed. "No self-respecting intelligence operative would stoop to obsession. It clouds one's judgement, impairs one's efficiency."

"Yes, it does," Julian agreed, his voice knowing and even to his ears unsettling. "But that doesn't mean you're not vulnerable to it. Your inability to forgive Garak for whatever it is you believe he did to you, even after all these years, is proof enough of that."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Tain said, looking stubbornly away.

Julian didn't bother pressing the matter. He knew he would make no headway with Tain. The others, however, were still capable of listening to him.

"I think he drank the last of his water in the night, as he usually does," Julian said. "So that he can relieve himself of it before the count, and not have to worry about mounting discomfort if Deyos drags on too long with his spiteful games. Tain's admitted that as he ages, he's been experiencing the urge to urinate more frequently. Two or three hours can be a long time to wait if you've just had a drink."

"Then why dissemble?" demanded Martok. "Why not admit he has nothing, and take his share of our water regardless?"

"Why should he have a share, if he has nothing to contribute?" Parvok said bitterly. "When others were in need, he refused to offer his aid. What makes him worthy of ours?"

Julian pointed a tired finger at the Romulan man. "That's why," he said. "He didn't want to listen to us say things like that, and perhaps ultimately refuse him. But even more…" He fixed his eyes on Tain, saddened but not surprised at his sudden insight. "He did it because this philosophy — what he calls my  _Federation dogma_ , but is just as much a precept of Romulan society, which values the needs of the many, or Klingon culture, which holds it dishonourable to abandon a fellow warrior — is so distasteful to him that he  _has_  to reject it, even when he'd be the one to benefit the most. He'd rather go thirty-seven hours without so much as wetting his lips than admit he needs our support. Our community."

There was a protracted silence. Now instead of Julian, they were all watching Tain. Arrogant amusement turned to irritation and then black belligerence on the broad, proud Cardassian face.

"Is this true?" Kalenna asked at last, very quietly.

"You're fools if you listen to him," scoffed Tain. "He's asking all of you to give up part of your share for someone with nothing to contribute. The arrogance of it, to think his morals should supersede your basic needs!"

"You're the one who's arrogant, to assume the only thing a person can contribute in this situation is water," Julian said. He slung his leg back around the corner of the bench, and turned his back on Tain. He knew it wasn't just contempt for his philosophy that lay behind the man's games. There was an element of pride to his actions, too. Those who had not been raised with the philosophy of universal care and support of others often feared that accepting such aid was taking charity and that this was in some way demeaning. That it was a personal failing to have to lean on others now and again. They didn't understand that in every life, there were times when you were able to give, and times when you needed to receive — and there was no shame in either.

"You love to remind us how important your work is," Julian said now, trying to sound dryly ironic so that Tain would not suspect he pitied him, just a little, for his blindness in this. "Well, that's a contribution."

"We've established I can do no work today, Doctor," Tain countered venomously.

"No, but you can work tomorrow," said Julian. " _If_  you're not incapacitated from dehydration. And if that's not reason enough to feel you're worthy, you could aid the well-being of every person in this room if you refrained from harping on us for the rest of the day! Make that your contribution."

Only because Tain couldn't see his face any longer was Julian able to grimace at his glaring error. He had just guaranteed that the Cardassian would make himself more insufferable than ever. But the words were out, and there was no taking them back. Julian held up his hand to Martok.

"General, may I have his bottle?" he asked. "Either we all drink, or no one does. I'll pour the water out myself if I have to."

"Now who's being spiteful?" mocked Tain, but he made no further protest.

 _(fade_ )

No one protested Julian taking upon himself to measure out equal portions. Some of his cellmates trusted him that implicitly. Others, perhaps, did not dare to question. Tain made a great show of indifference. It took longer than it should have to get every bottle to the same level. Julian's headache was still grinding on between his ears, and he was distracted by thirst, by worry, and by the slow crescendo of his hunger. In the end, he had six bottles, each with approximately three hundred seventy-five millilitres in it. A little more than a cup and a half a person. A little better than a tenth of what his own body needed for the interval it had to last. The Romulans would be a little better off than he, Tain and Martok a little worse. Julian could not guess at the Breen's needs, but he was sure none of them would be in good condition when they were finally let out of here.

He was aware of another problem, too. As he worked, first amalgamating the whole supply and then apportioning it with as much care as he could muster, Kalenna grew visibly uncomfortable. At first Julian thought it might be fastidiousness. Certainly this wasn't an ideal situation: each of them but the Breen had contaminated their own bottles with saliva and oral bacteria. But it was impossible to prevent cross-contamination in these circumstances. Julian was going to have to rely on the fact that none of them showed any signs of communicable illness — no one in the camp did, so far as he had observed over these last few weeks. The Dominion's sanitary measures were apparently adequate enough for that.

He considered explaining this to Kalenna, but he began to suspect this was not the source of her unease. Her expression tightened every time he poured, dribbling a little more water into one bottle or another. Presently she moved off to the far end of the room, pressing a shoulder to the locked door and looking resolutely away. He had an idea she was trying very hard not to listen. When he saw her jiggle one foot as he started to cap off the canteens, he thought he understood.

"What are we supposed to do about eliminating waste?" he asked quietly, not addressing the question to anyone in particular. There were no facilities in the barracks. The Jem'Hadar had not left them so much as a bucket.

"What do you think?" snorted Tain. He was lying on his back now, wrapped in his blanket and staring up at the ceiling. "Hold it until you can't anymore."

"And soil the floor?" asked Julian. "Do they expect us to live in our own filth?"

"That's exactly what they expect," Parvok muttered. "That's part of the punishment: it's supposed to make us grateful for a clean and orderly barracks."

It was orderly, but calling it "clean" was a grave misrepresentation. The whole place was dingy and grimy, with drifts of dust and grit in the corners. Still, that was a far cry from turning the room into an open latrine.

"There's the bedpan," Julian reflected aloud.

"Inside the wall," Tain said flatly. "Too risky to fetch it,  _much_  too risky to be caught with it. Besides, it would only accommodate a couple of uses."

He was right: the circuit casing was shallow, and wouldn't hold more than a litre of fluid. There might have been other flotsam that they could have used as containers, but they were all inside the wall and inaccessible. The risk of fetching them was simply too great, when there was no way to explain one prisoner's absence from the barracks.

"What happens tomorrow?" Julian asked, wishing he didn't have to think about this. It was repugnant, and he already felt nauseated by the idea. "Will they give us the means to clean up?"

"They run a decontamination sweep," said Parvok. " _Assuming_  we pass inspection tomorrow."

"A decontamination sweep," Julian echoed.

Parvok nodded grimly. "It's one thing to make us miserable. It's another to turn the camp into an open sewer. As bad as it will be today, this time tomorrow there'll be no trace left."

That still didn't do anything to alleviate their current predicament. Julian stole a glance at Kalenna, who had been watching him with guarded gratitude. He didn't feel the need to relieve himself yet; he'd made it to the waste reclamation room this morning. But he thought he could force out a few millilitres to spare her the indignity of being the first person to urinate on the floor.

Then inspiration struck. Julian slid off the bench and dropped right to his knees. Hurriedly, he dragged the cargo canister out from under his bed, and unsnapped the clamps. He started offloading his cache of bandages with both hands, heaping them on his cot.

"Oh, no, Doctor…" Kalenna protested quietly. Martok, who had been pacing in a tight circle again, paused and looked on in interest.

"It's perfect," said Julian. "It should be watertight. It has a lid, so we can cover it when it's not in use and try to keep the stench to a minimum. And if they run a decontamination sweep, all we need to do tomorrow is push it under the bunk again, open, and it will be clean when we get back from the count."

Martok nodded approvingly. "Very clever," he muttered.

Julian scooped up the two little bottles of disinfectant and the makeshift lancet. The case was empty now. He didn't bother to rise: he shuffled on his knees, pushing it towards the back of the room.

"Put it in  _your_  corner, if you don't mind," Tain said sourly. "I'm not interested in sleeping next to a slop bucket."

Julian shot him an exasperated look: he had meant to settle it just to the left of the small table at the very back of the room, nearer his own cot than Tain's, but a respectable distance from both. It wasn't worth the argument. He moved the case right into the corner, and climbed to his feet.

"We could try to make a screen with a blanket," he suggested with an apologetic look at Kalenna.

She shook her head. "That is unnecessary," she said. "I trust the courteous among us will be considerate enough to look away."

It was a barb aimed at Tain, but he didn't seem to be listening. He had both hands crossed over his sternum now, and his inner eyelids were closed. He seemed to be meditating on the dimensions of the ceiling.

Julian returned to the bottles, while Kalenna slipped past him. Martok shuffled to the door, peering intently out into the corridor. Julian didn't think it wise for him to watch the other prisoners moving in and out of unlocked rooms and wandering the atrium, but he said nothing. More than Tain's mockery, he feared for Martok's sanity. He remembered the near-psychosis the warrior had exhibited on the night the Jem'Hadar had released him from isolation. Julian knew the nights were difficult for him: from the moment the door locked at curfew to the moment it released in the morning, Martok waged a grim war with his psyche. He battled his instincts through sleep and preparation, but he had not been prepared for this. The knowledge they were trapped, and would remain trapped for so many hours to come, was already gnawing at him.

Julian closed the last of the bottles and got up to distribute them. He gave Parvok the first one, and handed the second to the Breen, who took it after a moment and seemed to study it, helmet tipped to one side. Julian turned back to pick up two more when he felt a gloved hand settle on his shoulder.

He turned. The Breen had risen swiftly and soundlessly. They still held their bottle stiffly before them, deliberately away from their chest.

"What is it?" Julian asked, even though he knew he could not be understood.

The Breen thrust the bottle forward. Julian looked at it, uncomprehending. Did they feel they had been given an unfair portion? They, like Julian and Kalenna, were receiving less than they had contributed. Without the language to explain the philosophy at work, did they understand the principle of redistribution?

They had to understand: this wasn't the first time they had participated in the pooling of the water ration. Yet they thrust their bottle at Julian yet again.

Julian shook his head. "I don't understand," he said.

The Breen made a rattling, metallic sound that might have been their natural voice, or else was filtered through some kind of respiration apparatus. It was a brief, three-syllable string of clangs and clatters, cut off abruptly as if they remembered too late that their language was as much gibberish to Julian as his glottal consonants and susurrations were to them.

The Breen released Julian's shoulder and pointed to the other bottles. They tipped their own four times in series, then cocked their head. Julian didn't understand. It looked like they were telling him to redistribute their share of the water, but that couldn't be so.

With clack of air that sounded almost like a sigh, the Breen folded back a flap of the durable tan cloth of their sleeve, baring a square panel about the size of a watch face. There were indicator lights and three tiny knobs, and there was a circular dial. It looked like a pie chart, marked in glowing green against dead grey. The green represented one hundred and forty-seven degrees out of the circle: just over a third.

Julian studied the panel, unable to make sense of the controls, and then looked up to where the Breen's face hid behind the featureless helmet. He wanted to speak, but he knew it was pointless. They couldn't even communicate by facial expression: he couldn't see theirs, and they probably didn't know how to interpret his.

The Breen pointed, first at the bottle and then at the dial. They waited. When Julian still did not seem to understand, they pointed again. The bottle. The dial. Just over a third of capacity for whatever it was measuring. Power? Temperature? Humidity?

Humidity. Water. The Breen emptied their first litre into a port on their suit every day after ration call. Julian had observed them more than once, topping up at intervals later in the day. Now they were trying to show him that they had water in their suit's reservoir; that they were not yet dry.

Was a third of the suit's capacity enough to last until tomorrow's ration call? Julian had no idea. He had no way to ask. He simply had to trust that the Breen understood the needs of their own body, and would not recklessly endanger their own health out of concern for the others. Julian took the bottle.

"Thank you," he said, even though he knew the words were nonsense.

The Breen clapped one gloved hand briefly over his, and then moved back to settle once more on their cot.

Kalenna had closed the lid of the cargo case, and she was rearranging her garments with her back to the rest of the room. Julian averted his eyes as he turned back to the bottles. "Parvok?" he said softly. The Romulan was already at his side, holding out his canteen for a share of the Breen's ration.

Julian doled it out carefully. It brought each of the five other prisoners' share up to just under half a litre. It wasn't enough to ease the misery they could look forward to over the long, fruitless day ahead, but it might make the difference in alleviating the strain on one of their overtaxed organs — Enabran Tain's heart, for instance, or Julian's healing kidney. It was an extra seventy-five millilitres each to nourish their brains and supply their livers and delay the onset of the inevitable muscle cramps of severe dehydration. It meant three extra mouthfuls each, which might stave off the maddening thirst.

Not for the first time, Julian wondered who the Breen was; what they had done in their previous life, on their faraway homeworld of vast ice fields and diamond-bright glaciers. Did they have a family? Who were their friends? What did they look forward to at the end of the day, when duty was done and it was time for pleasure? He wished he could ask. He wished he could make them understand that he wondered. He hoped they knew that he cared.

 _(fade_ )


	55. The Gnawing of the Mind

_Note: For a hilarious example of a person trying to bully a replicator into producing an unhealthy treat, try the first seventy seconds of TNG 3.08, "The Price"._

**Part X, Act II: The Gnawing of the Mind**

"That's it," Julian said, his voice quiet but firm. He sat on the edge of his cot, pulled away from the wall so that he was near enough to brace Martok's hand while the General put his fingers through a fifth repetition of his extensor stretches. With his own fingertips curled into the Klingon's palm and his thumbs bracing each metacarpal in turn, Julian watched intently as Martok lifted his fingers one by one. The first few sets had been, if not easy, at least bearable. But now the warrior was fatigued, and the laborious effort was clearly wearing on him. His whole body was braced against the ache, his teeth were bared, and although he tried to hide them, Julian could feel the deep, percussive tremors that rippled through his arm.

With any other patient — and indeed, with this one in any other circumstances — Julian would have pronounced the fourth repetition sufficient and called an end to the proceedings for the day. But he had made the mistake of announcing they were trying for five today, and Martok was determined to outlast the full regimen. Even for a man whose stubborn resolve was surely the stuff of legend, Martok was hyperfixated on his goal, and Julian understood why. It was something to cling to, something to focus on so that he could pretend he did not feel the oppressive solidity of the sealed door, or contemplate the narrowness of the room, or dwell on the fact that there was no way out.

It was that last, more than the size of the room, that clearly gnawed at the General. He did not need to give voice to his discomfort: it was plain in the rigidity of his posture, in the way his eyes kept flicking towards the unusable exit, in the ragged heaving of each breath. Martok did not suffer from claustrophobia, but from a pervasive, instinctual horror of incarceration. It was remarkable that he had adapted to the point where he could function day-to-day — bearing up even under the hours of nightly lock-down after curfew. The fact that he had managed to endure so long today was nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Julian stole a glance at his patient's face. Sweat was beading in the ridges of Martok's brow, and his nostrils flared against the pain as he forced his other fingers to remain straight while he lifted the third. Then Julian had to look down again, because he was watching the distal interphalangeal joint for any sign of instability. "Good," he coached. "Slowly, steadily. Almost done."

By Julian's best estimate, they had been locked in for seven hours. Parvok was sleeping, or pretending to sleep. Kalenna sat on her bunk, one leg tucked up and the other one swinging silently over the rail. For the Breen, calm and silent on their own cot, it was to all appearances an ordinary day. Tain was lying on his back, hands interlaced over his sternum. He had been twirling his thumbs in interlocking circles for at least forty minutes. Julian tried not to let his eyes drift in that direction: it was absolutely maddening to watch.

All of them, even the Romulans, were showing signs of thirst. Martok's lips were dry, and when his teeth were not bared in pain or ill-concealed agitation, he chafed them together as if this might somehow alleviate the discomfort. Parvok would periodically open his bottle, raise it to his lips, and think better of it before capping the canteen again, his thirst unrequited, and trying to ignore it for another twenty minutes. Every few attempts he would yield to the urge to drink, and take as sparing a mouthful as he could. The look of strained despair when he did so was painful to behold. Kalenna had drunk only once that Julian had noticed, but she had not let her bottle out of the crook of her elbow since the klaxon had sounded for ration call outside.

For his own part, Julian's only strategy was to try not to think about it. It wasn't easy. His mouth felt gummy and foul, the sour taste of his breath thick on a tongue that kept sticking to his hard palate. In the moments when he couldn't ignore his clawing and ever-mounting thirst, he was grimly grateful for his insolence with Arat'zuma. The extra water he had been able to drink in the kitchen had left him in a stronger position to endure this current deprivation. Although his body had long since spent it, he did not want to contemplate what condition he would be in now without it.

"Release slowly," he said, as Marok began to ease his finger back down. "Excellent. This is where the real strengthening happens. Nice and slow."

"You do not need to coddle me, Doctor," Martok muttered sourly. "I am familiar with the exercise, and do not require adulation."

"You have your rituals; I have mine," Julian challenged with a thin ghost of a grin. "If I just sit here quietly, I'm surplus to requirements. Humour me, General: it makes me feel useful."

Martok snorted, but jerked his head in acquiescence. He exhaled tightly as he reached the end of the movement and was finally able to relax his toiling finger. He sucked in another breath, prepared to start again.

"Just a minute," Julian said. He shifted his right hand from supporting Martok's palm, and ran finger and thumb along the length of his longest finger, apply light, massaging pressure to the overworked muscles and the tiny, strained ligaments. He could tell from the way the General's eye fluttered to half-mast that his efforts brought significant relief. Julian made another pass, feeling the subtle softening of relaxing sinews, and then moved his hand back to its original position.

Again, he considered offering Martok the option to quit. Again, he dismissed it. Martok set his jaw resolutely and tried to lift his fourth finger. Julian felt the tendons in his hand grow taut. The finger didn't move.

Martok made a low noise of angry discontent, and redoubled his efforts. This time, Julian's sensitive hands felt a tremor that rippled all the way up into the Klingon's forearm. Still, the finger did not move. Then slowly, one set of phalanges began to rise: not the fourth, but the third again.

With a roar of frustration, Martok tore his hand from Julian's grasp as he launched himself off the bench and into a careening turn. He rounded the table and strode for the door, shoulders fraught with tension. Julian scrambled to his own feet, startled by the violence of the other man's motion.

"It's fine," he said, breathless but striving for calm capability. "You've done enough for today. We can try again tomorrow."

" _No_!" Martok snarled. He drew back one booted foot and kicked the door so that it shuddered with a hollow  _bong_. "It is futile! It is pointless! Slow and painful toil, day after day, and for  _what_? So that weakened joints can be compromised once more, and reset, and laboriously strengthened, only to be destroyed  _again —_ never to heal, never to regain the might they have lost, never to defeat the endless oncoming ranks of the Jem'Hadar!"

He kicked the door again, coiling out of the motion to pull back his fist. It was his left one, at least; the right was curled against his breastplate, guarded instinctively. All the same, Julian's whole body tensed in anticipatory dread, and he tried to spring forward swiftly enough to intercept.

"No—" he began, as he leapt.

He wasn't nimble enough, after weeks of underfed inactivity and his own dreary healing process. Martok reared back a little farther, and punched the door with all the strength in his powerful arm. The roar of anguished rage that tore from the depths of his ribcage seemed to reverberate through the barracks. Kalenna straightened, startled. Parvok sat bolt upright, scuttling against the wall near the head of his cot, as far from the enraged Klingon as he could get. Even Tain propped himself up on his elbows, looking down the length of his body in bland annoyance.

Martok was locked in battle with the door. He heaved his arm over his head this time, intent upon raining down a hammering blow. Julian could not help but imagine the stresses the last one had placed upon an elbow that, while more stable perhaps than the fingers, was itself still mending after repeated traumatic dislocations. He also knew it was only a matter of time, perhaps only of seconds, before Martok forgot the damage to his right hand and used it, too, in his assault on the tritanium panels.

Julian did the only thing he could think to try: he interposed his own lean body between the Klingon and his target, thrusting up both hands to catch Martok's armoured forearm as it fell. Julian had to throw all of his weight and his wiry strength into arresting the forward momentum before the Klingon's hand could connect with the door again, but even in that moment of desperate effort he was careful not to twist the arm in such a way as to compromise the elbow joint. It was an exquisite object study in applied kinesiology, and Julian had a feeling his orthopedics professors would have been proud.

The moment of satisfaction was fleeting. Martok's other hand came up, fist blasting into Julian's chin. He caught sight of the motion a nanosecond before it struck, and with a reflex that he surely owed to his parents' criminality, Julian flung his head back and to the left as bone met bone. It wasn't enough to evade the blow — he could not have done so without first releasing Martok's other arm, and there was no time for that — but it did lessen the impact. Martok's fist struck a body in motion instead of a body at rest, sparing both Julian's jaw and, far more importantly, his own compromised knuckles, from the full force of the swing.

Even so, Julian was dazed by the rattling percussion in his jaw, and he didn't see the other fist coming until it was blasting into the side of his face. For a frozen instant, he couldn't understand when Martok had wrenched his left arm free of Julian's hands. Then he was careening backward with the force of the Klingon's fist, and his fingers finally let go. Julian's hold on the General's arm hadn't hindered him at all: he had taken advantage of the human's moment of distraction in the wake of the first punch to deal the second.

Even with his own heightened reflexes and genetically enhanced strength, even with Martok's burden of injuries both recent and chronic, Julian was no match for the Klingon warrior. He was knocked clean off his feet, crashing backward into Kalenna's cot. Julian's skull hit the wall with a deafening crack, momentarily blinding him as his eyes watered in pain. He heard the rustle of chainmail as Martok lunched toward him.

"General!" Kalenna snapped, the cot rattling and bouncing as she shifted onto her knees and flung her own small body over Julian's, interposing herself between him and the irrational Klingon. "Cease this at once!"

Julian couldn't think clearly, but he did understand that Martok was not in his right mind. On the night they had first met, after the General had been released from solitary, Julian had reflected that the senselessly violent combat response had looked strangely like a panic attack. He thought the same thing now, even as he tried to gather his scattered wits to defend himself.

Martok let loose another roar of insensate rage, and Kalenna hunkered down lower over Julian. On her hands and knees, bridging him with her arched back, she looked hazily catlike and fiercely predacious. Julian couldn't see her face, and probably wouldn't have been able to bring it into focus anyhow, but he could imagine her expression: hard lines of determination at the corners of her mouth, bright eyes blazing.

"General!" she repeated, still more forcefully. "Enough!"

The last time Martok had been in such a state, it had taken a series of shocks to bring him out of it. The sudden disappearance of his opponent when the Fourth rolled into an abrupt withdrawal; the moment of perplexity when his depth perception failed, bringing his sweeping blade short of Ikat'ika; and finally, Tain's nonchalant approach to remove the kar'takin from his hands. Julian did not think a stern command from a Romulan woman rose to that level of distraction.

And yet, it seemed to be enough — perhaps because Martok was not yet so far gone as he had been after two days in solitary confinement. He exhaled a long, harsh sound of frustration and disgust, and turned his back on the two aliens.

Kalenna sat back on her heels, absently helping Julian to push his hips all the way onto the cot so that he could ease up off the wall. She did not take her eyes from Martok as she did so, and as Julian's vision came back into focus he could see the tension across the Klingon's back and down his limbs. His shoulders were still hunched high, and his chest was heaving. No doubt his pulse was racing.

Julian put a ginger hand to the back of his head, feeling a tender place that was sure to bruise. He moved to his mouth, dabbing at a stinging spot with the web between finger and thumb. His lip was riven and bleeding, but all of his teeth were still where they belonged. He knew he had been lucky: getting between an enraged Klingon warrior and his target had been a colossally imprudent thing to do.

So was what he was going to do next, but Julian really didn't have a choice in the matter. It was either take a risk, or neglect his duty as Martok's physician. He was not willing to do the latter.

"Let me see your hands," he said resolutely, leaning forward so that he could brace his elbows on his knees. His head was swimming, and he worked his jaw against the bruising ache. There was a low pain in his cheekbone, too; not intense but very deep. Apparently the Dominion's osteogenic stimulators didn't repair fractures completely, or maybe Tiellyn simply hadn't bothered to finish her work.

Martok snorted heavily. He hung his head but did not turn around. "You have done enough, Doctor," he said bitterly. "I have repaid your ministrations with violence, and that is an act without honour."

Julian wanted to argue this. What was done in the throes of a panic attack could not be laid at the door of the sufferer. He didn't think Martok had been properly in control of his faculties, and Julian should have been more cautious in his approach —  _would_  have been more cautious, if not for his fear that the General would do far more harm to himself than he had done to his doctor. But he knew it wouldn't do Martok any good to hear that argument; it would wound his pride, especially now when there was no chance of privacy. He wouldn't want Enabran Tain to be privy to Julian's insights into the violent outbursts, and the root they had in terror.

"Restore your honour by doing me the courtesy of respecting my work," he said instead. "Let me see your hands."

Martok turned with sudden vehemence. Beyond him, Parvok cringed, clearly fearful that he might attach again. But the General merely thrust out his arms. His left hand was still curled into a fist, the knuckles bloodied but the elbow clearly capable of almost normal extension. The right was a crumpled starfish, one leg akimbo. The proximal interphalangeal joint on the fifth finger was once again dislocated.

Julian did a quick exam, running deft fingers over the other joints to make sure they were intact. The damage to the left hand had almost certainly been done by the door, and Martok had been fortuante: the calloused skin was split, but the bones beneath were undamaged. The force he had exerted with that first blow would have been enough to fracture human metacarpals.

"All right," Julian sighed. He heaved himself to his feet, Kalenna reaching up to brace the small of his back as he rose. He tottered a little when he took his first step, but Martok cupped a hand under his elbow and steadied him as he moved to his cot. The bandages and other scanty medical supplies were heaped on his blanket, still meticulously folded for the inspection. Parvok must have done it, either last night after it was plain that Julian had been locked out, or this morning before the count. Julian spared a sour thought for that wasted effort as he found the slender half of the stolen stylus and the other materials he needed to bandage Martok's hand.

"Sit, please," he said, nodding at the bench. Martok looked reluctant. He was still clearly agitated, unable even to keep his feet still. They shifted against the bare composite floor as he rocked his weight from one to the other. His heels weren't even touching the ground: he looked like a pugilist ready to spring into action, which was exactly what Julian was trying to prevent. "Sit!" he said sternly, dropping down onto the edge of his cot. "I'm still seeing stars, and I have no intention of standing on ceremony."

Martok bared his teeth, glaring a challenge at Julian. But he saw stubbornness to equal his own, and he was compelled to respect it. He sat down heavily, balanced on the very edge of the bench. He could still leap up at a moment's notice, and his body was still thrumming with anxious energy, but he leaned over his lap and braced his forearm on one broadly planted knee. Beyond him, Tain had rolled onto his right hip. He had his head braced on one palm, arm crooked up indolently. He was smirking, but at least he was silent. Julian shot him a blistering look of warning as he set to work.

He positioned the makeshift splint with one hand and used the other to ease the tiny joint out of its painful misalignment. "As soon as this is dressed," he said, glancing up at Martok while he let his sense of touch guide him; "you can take me through your Mok'bara routine. You could do with something to focus on, and I'm obviously in need of a little balance training. It shouldn't be  _that_  easy to send a Starfleet officer flying."

Martok's good eye widened in momentary surprise, and then he relaxed a little — almost imperceptibly, but it was a positive sign. He snorted in reluctant amusement, but then he shook his head bitterly.

"There is no room," he growled. "The barracks is too small."

"It's not too small," Julian argued. "There's room at the back. You do your exercises here before every bout in the ring."

Martok glared at him, disliking this logic. "That is different," he muttered.

And Julian saw that it  _was_  different. Then, Martok was preparing for battle, not fighting off incarceration psychosis. Then, the door was closed but not locked: he could leave the barracks at will. The immediate freedom to wander the compound allowed him to cope with — if not to forget — that he was trapped here in a much broader sense. Now, there was nothing to distract from the truth, nothing to use as a buffer between his beleaguered instincts and the reality of his imprisonment. Now, the barracks seemed smaller because it was the limit of his world.

Julian dropped his voice very low, leaning in so that only Martok could make out the words. "I know it is," he murmured, meeting the General's eye with sincerity and empathy in his own. "I know. But we have to do something to keep away the madness. I refuse to allow you to hurt yourself again."

Martok's face was carved in canyons of miserable anger. He was grappling with himself, with the horrors of his own heart. It was a grimmer battle than any he faced in the ring. Julian did not look away, even though his hands were now wrapping the dislocated finger, splinting it between its straight, half-healed neighbour and the slender metal rod. Julian let himself work by feel, slowly and determinedly, and held the General's gaze.

"Besides," he said, a little less circumspectly; "I'm not sure the rest of us will survive 'til morning if we can't figure out a way to relieve your latent energy."

The sound that broke from the Klingon's lips was harsh, hoarse, and sour. It barked out in three staccato syllables that made Parvok jump, startled Kalenna, and even caused Tain's eyes to widen a little. Julian didn't even stiffen, though the hot wind of the exclamation blew right in his face. He had been expecting some response, after all, though he'd really envisioned something more like a snort or perhaps a thin chuckle. The deep, sharp laugh took him by surprise, and he found himself smiling tiredly.

 _Match point for the human_ , he thought.  _Deyos hasn't broken us yet_.

 _(fade_ )

Julian lay on his side, his back to the rest of the room and his legs drawn up as far as the narrow cot allowed. He had his left hand curled up under his cheek, augmenting the inadequate support of the foul-smelling pillow. The right one was pressed to his upper abdomen, exerting pressure just under his ribcage. He was trying to encourage his stomach to stop its incessant, cramping complaints.

For a while, he had tried closing his eyes. The disciplined movements of the Mok'bara were not so much physically taxing as bodily and spiritually centring. But by the time Martok finally pronounced the regimen at an end, Julian had been lightheaded, nauseous, and weak-kneed. Martok had retreated to his own cot, flinging its mattress unceremoniously to the floor before lying down, only to fall asleep almost at once. Julian had groped for his through a veil of black pulsars, fearful he might faint. It wasn't the exertion itself that had reduced him to such a state, but the hunger underlying it. The dizziness had been slow to pass, and now Julian felt clammy, chilled, and enfeebled. It was all he could do to lie here and fight a body that was begging, frantically and fruitlessly, for him to give up his foolishness and  _eat_. Neither his stomach nor his aching head nor his liver wrung dry of glycogen seemed to understand he wasn't doing this by choice. He wasn't fasting: he was starving.

He shouldn't have been starving. It had been almost two Earth days now since Julian had last eaten, but that wasn't really such a long time to go without food. Even on top of a chronic caloric deficit, his body should have been able to cope. In fact, the routine of being fed less than half of what his body wanted once every thirty-four hours should have made this longer deprivation  _easier_  to tolerate, not harder. His stomach should be shrunken, his ghrelin response blunted, and his basal metabolic rate slowed into famine mode. His body should have been burning fuel more slowly, conserving what little it could to ensure his continued survival.

Julian had read any number of studies on fasting, famine and malnutrition. In fact, he'd done a comparative meta-analysis during his first year of practice, when it seemed that every Bajoran patient he saw was suffering to one degree or another from malnutrition. Even the indomitable Major Kira had been chronically anemic, deficient in several micronutrients, and skirting the boundary of unhealthily underweight. Julian had pooled his own observations with the result of several other observational studies on the post- and intra-Occupation population of the planet — the latter either carried out by relief teams from neutral worlds like Tohvun III, or salvaged from the Infirmary computers. The latter were the work of Cardassian physicians and scientists, a troubling legacy of questionable professionals who had treated their research subjects like animals instead of intelligent, sentient people.

Julian had felt uneasy using such data, but he was equally reluctant to waste it. Some of the human studies he had used for the comparative analysis had come from uncomfortable sources as well. No one had starved on Earth in two hundred and fifty years. Much of the available data dated back to the Post-Atomic Horror, and not all of it came from countries that had been observant of the standards of ethical research. Julian had decided it was better to make use of the information, when the structure and methodology of the unethical studies proved sound, in the hope that some good might come of the abuses of the past. He knew it was a shaky philosophical premise, but it was one with which he had been forced to make peace over the years. His own life, after all, was an exercise in finding meaning in the unconscionable and unchangeable deeds of the past by trying to turn them to the greater good.

In the course of compiling the meta-analysis for publication, he had learned a great deal about starvation — not only in Bajorans but in humans. He knew how his body was supposed to react to the caloric reduction, and it wasn't performing as expected. His appetite wasn't blunting, his body wasn't adapting, and he most certainly was not adjusting to his restrictive new diet.

He was losing weight too rapidly, too. Julian had expected to lose some: all the other prisoners certainly seemed to. Kalenna was visibly underweight. Martok's mail shirt fit him too loosely to have been designed that way. Even Tain was not so robust now as he had been at their first meeting three years ago. The other prisoners were, for the most part, bony. But none of them were emaciated. They were underfed, but not overtly starving.

Julian, however, was shedding body mass with alarming rapidity. He'd known he was getting leaner: his jumpsuit fit more loosely about the waist, and on the rare occasions he removed his singlet, he could see how the contours of his ribs were a little more dramatically defined than before. But it had been driven home to him uncomfortably today.

He'd half-hoped that he might make it through their day of lockdown without having to do more than empty his bladder, but his body had other things in mind. Before beginning the martial arts ritual with Martok, Julian had been obliged to squat over the cargo container to discharge the watery remains of yesterday's meagre meal. He'd been inclined towards constipation since awaking in the prison, but apparently his intestines had made use of the extra half-litre of water to move things along a little more quickly — not knowing, as his brain did, that he was about to become dangerously dehydrated again. It was unpleasant and dishearteningly embarrassing, but not particularly distressing.

But Julian hadn't dressed himself immediately after rising. He simply pulled up his trunks for modesty's sake, intent upon closing the lid of the case as rapidly as possible. Their improvised latrine was already beginning to reek, and he wanted to keep the rank odour contained. He had bent to clip the latches closed, grateful that the box was apparently airtight, and when he had straightened, his trunks — comfortably snug only a few short weeks ago, and fitted with an elastic waistband that was supposed to prevent this kind of inconvenience — had slipped right off his hips.

He had caught them and pulled up his jumpsuit to hold them in place, grateful that it, at least, could have hung off of a broomstick if the broomstick had shoulders. But Julian couldn't stop thinking about it. He estimated his daily intake at about twelve hundred kilocalories. He spent most of each day more or less sedentary, sheltered in the barracks. He was more active than some — Parvok, for example — because his survey of the prisoners brought him to other units. And the count surely burned energy he could ill afford to spare. Even so, it was hardly a strenuous existence. He was much more active at home, where he had a daily exercise routine, a large space station to wander at will, holosuites to play in and a racquetball court to frequent and innumerable other little ways he slipped healthy physical activity into his routine. Considering his activity level, and even allowing for the fact that it was twelve hundred kilocalories every thirty-four hours instead of every twenty-six, Julian estimated that he should not have lost more than three or four kilograms since his arrival. For his hip circumference to have shrunk far enough that his trunks, now grimy and vile-smelling despite all his efforts to stay clean, could just slip off of him like that, he must have lost at least twice as much.

There were two possibilities. Perhaps the Dominion grain used to make the prisoners' bland mush was less calorically dense than comparable Alpha Quadrant cereals. Or perhaps Julian's basal metabolic rate had not slowed to accommodate the scarcity of food.

His metabolism was just one more thing that had been altered by the Adigeon doctors. Both of Julian's parents tended towards stoutness. He had no memory of his extended family — Richard and Amsha Bashir had made the choice to cut themselves off from everyone they had known before their son's illegal genetic enhancement. But the few holoimages his mother had kept proved that her side of the family, at least, was for the most part a little shorter than average height, and plump. At six, Jules had been in the tenth percentile for height, and the fiftieth for weight. After the enhancements, Julian had grown to one hundred and eighty-two centimetres, slender and lanky and tall.

Was it possible that, in their efforts to "improve" his body, the geneticists on Adigeon Prime had inadvertently switched off the mechanism for metabolic downregulation?

Julian felt another shiver of hungry nausea, and he screwed his eyes closed as he rode it out. His ribs ached with the contortions of his empty stomach, and this train of thought was not making them any easier to ignore. Still, he couldn't abandon it. He was in full scientist mode. He had formulated a hypothesis, and now he had to think it through.

The human metabolism was incredibly complex. No one gene controlled it. It was a network of interplaying factors, affected not only by a person's DNA but by their habits, their nutritional and athletic history, their general health, their age, and their environment. Countless checks and balances provided homeostasis and made each person tend towards a particular body type and weight. Many of the problems of human nutrition had been solved by the invention of the replicator. Not only famine and scarcity had been obliterated; replicated food was also inherently healthy, nutritionally balanced, and complete. There was no such thing as an empty calorie from a replicator, at least not without a deliberate override of the programming. The rampant obesity that had plagued much of Earth in previous centuries had been brought to heel when high-fat and high-fructose foods had been replaced with facsimiles that tasted just as enticing, but provided instead adequate protein, complex carbohydrates, healthy triglycerides, vitamins, and nutrients. Some people were thin, some people were plump, but pathological obesity was almost forgotten. It was easy to become complacent about questions of metabolism when everyone was, regardless of body type or size, well-nourished and healthy.

Of course, it was still important to make nutritious choices when eating natural foods, instead of relying solely on replicators. Even so, Julian had never had to give his meals a second thought. A couple of years ago, he'd gone through a brief phase of watching what he ate. He'd done it because he had just turned thirty, and was beginning to feel the icy hand of mortality on the back of his neck. It was something people were supposed to do at thirty: ease up on the indulgences, cut back on the sweets, try to make healthier choices to support a long and happy life. It was certainly something he recommended to his patients, especially those who were a little too fond of the jumja stand or other indulgences. Julian had felt it was only fair to practice what he preached, and so he had given it a try.

It had been a short-lived project, because it had made no measurable difference at all. He was slender when he ate whatever he wanted, he was slender when he tried to cut back on the scones and the Delvan fluff pastries and the pints of authentic bitter at Quark's. Blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin output, mitochondrial function, every quantifiable marker of health: they had all been excellent before the experiment, they all remained excellent (but unchanged) throughout. Eventually, Julian had tired of the effort and returned to his usual habits, complacently believing his body would simply take care of itself. And it had, until now.

It would have been an understandable oversight, Julian reflected grimly. The idea was to produce a perfect specimen of a child — at least, he was quite sure that had been his father's perception of it. Tall, lean, athletic, preternaturally intelligent: the design to which little Jules Bashir had been altered to fit was everything a discerning architect might desire. It sickened Julian to his core in a way he could not often bear to make himself face that his parents' motivations in having his DNA manipulated beyond all recognition had been the same ones that had propelled the eugenics movement from its earliest inception. They had been trying to create a "better" son, and all of the alterations to his body, his mind, and his being had been geared toward that end.

Julian remembered the quality control examinations more clearly than he did the actual procedures. By then, his IQ had jumped almost exponentially, and he was processing and synthesizing new information at a rapid rate. His vocabulary had grown by two dozen words a day, and he started to understand more and more of what was being said. He remembered the thrill of being able to make himself understood when he needed something. And he remembered the tests. Games and puzzles to evaluate his memory, his problem-solving skills, his mathematical faculties, his depth perception, and his reflexes. Treadmill tests for stamina, heart-rate, and lung capacity. Endless applications of diagnostic devices, all to make sure that the modifications had been carried off perfectly.

He hadn't really understood why they were putting him through all of these exercises: it had been enough to know that he was succeeding, to listen to the eager praise of the Adigeon doctors, to see the delight in his mother's eyes, to hear words of approval — earnest, enthusiastic  _approval!_  — from his father, and to understand that finally, at long last, he was good at something. Only much later, when he had learned the ugly truth of what had been done to him, when he finally understood the implications and the totality with which his parents had destroyed his chances for a normal, honest life, did Julian think back and understand why he had been put through such a barrage of tests. The Adigeon doctors had wanted to make sure everything was functioning properly before turning their creation over to the people who had paid for him.

A shudder of revulsion ripped through Julian, violent enough to make the cot rattle beneath him. He flinched, and forced his body to be still. He stared at the rivet nearest his nose, trying to focus on its shape and its dimensions and the subtle grain of the cast alloy.  _The melting point of industrial tritanium is 3347 degrees Celsius_.

He didn't want to think about these things. He  _never_  wanted to think about these things. And yet he couldn't help it now. Not for the first time, he thought wistfully of all the distractions with which he had filled his life back home, so that he never had to dwell on the truth buried in his chromosomes. Work, research, recreation, friends, whatever new catastrophe or puzzle or adventure had cropped up in any given week: not since he'd left high school behind had Julian had this much time to  _think_. And just now, he didn't even have the dubious distraction of his nutritional study — which, compelling though it was, really didn't use his whole brain even when he wasn't shut up in a locked room with five other silently suffering unfortunates.

In all those tests, hadn't the Adigeon doctors evaluated his metabolism? Of course they had: they must have. But assessing it for daily function and assessing it for a famine response were two different things. They'd have wanted to be sure they could deliver the svelte, athletic body they had promised, but it would not have occurred to them even to wonder how Jules Bashir would cope with starvation. Why would it? He had been slated to return to Earth, to the very heart of the United Federation of Planets, where want and dissipation were entirely unknown. No one would have had a reasonable expectation that he would ever have to experience hunger — not for more than a day or two, anyway. Why would anyone have even paused to ask the question?

And the only way to test it, as far as Julian could see, would have been to withhold food for a few days and monitor BMR. Deliberately starving a six-year-old child was something no compassionate person could countenance. And the Adigeon doctors, despite their very different perspective on the ethics of genetic enhancement, had been compassionate people. He remembered that. Even when they were ignoring his pleas to stop the procedures, or closing their ears as he wept and begged to see his mother, they had been gentle, kind and patient. They had genuinely cared for his welfare; they had just had a very different idea than Julian did about how best to do so.

If they had compromised his body's ability to slow its basal metabolic rate in response to starvation, it had been an accident. If they had failed to catch it afterwards, that had been an understandable oversight. All his adult life, as he learned more and more about the ways in which genetic recoding so often went unspeakably awry, Julian had wondered how it was possible that the doctors who had performed his procedures had done it so perfectly. He had wondered if they had made some mistake, after all: something subtle and undetectable, but still imperfect. Now it seemed he might have found something.

It was strangely comforting, he reflected as he let the rivet blur out of intense hyperfocus. Even as he lay there, half-mad with hunger, kneading his knuckles into his umbilicus and trying not to think about food, he couldn't help but feel an almost smug little burst of vindication.

 _Not so perfect after all, am I, Dad?_  he thought spitefully.

 _(fade_ )


	56. Turned Loose

**Part X, Act III: Turned Loose**

The pad by the door glowed yellow, and Barracks 6 was silent. General Martok was asleep again, having woken to pace and fume and insist upon performing the physical therapy exercises for his elbow yet again. He held the mastery over his agitation, but only just. Julian thought there was no clearer indication of this than the way he worried at his freshly bandaged hand: though he picked at the dressing almost incessantly, Martok constrained the obvious urge to rip it off. Nevertheless, his constant restive motion was unnerving, and grated at everyone's increasingly frayed nerves. It was a tremendous relief to everyone when he tired at last and lay wrathfully down to sleep once more, but to Julian most of all. He was not sure how he had become the mediator of disparate cultures and personalities, lately come into the mix as he was, but he seemed to have fallen into the role.

Tain, too, was asleep at last. Or he was lying silently with his eyes closed, at least. Julian would take what he could get in that regard. Though he had held his tongue during the altercation at the door, Tain had passed up no other opportunity for snide commentary or a cutting remark. Twice, Julian had to draw his fire so that others — once Martok and once Kalenna — could use the primitive latrine without a barrage of mockery. When Parvok grew restless and rose to stretch his legs, Tain whittled him down with a few cruel words that found their mark before either Julian or Kalenna could spring to his defence. By the time they did, the damage had been done. Parvok, chastened, retreated back to his cot, drawing up his feet onto it as if it were a raft in deadly waters. He hadn't left it since.

He was sitting there now, hands dangling from arms braced on his knees, the only other person in the barracks still upright. Curfew had sounded about three hours ago, by Julian's last estimate, and even the muffled noises from outer prison had ceased. The silence was oppressive, but Julian was too numb with weariness, thirst, and the incessant gnawing of his agonizingly empty stomach to break it.

"The last of your water?" Parvok asked. His voice was hesitant and hoarse, and he glanced uncertainly at Tain's sleeping hulk as he spoke.

Julian looked down at the canteen curled in his hand. He had been rocking it from side to side without realizing it, and his cheeks burned with remorse as he realized how tormenting the soft sloshing sound must be. It took a considerable effort to set the bottle aside, and he interlaced his hands between his knees to restrain the urge to retrieve it immediately.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Parvok shook his head. "I have two mouthfuls left. I think. I wanted to wait as long as I possibly could." He shifted uncomfortably. "Major Kalenna says humans need more water than Romulans. Is she right?"

Julian nodded. "Humans lose fluids through perspiration, so we have a greater need to replenish them."

Parvok nodded. "I never spoke to a human before I met you," he mused. "You are not what I expected."

Julian counterfieted a small smile he did not feel. "I hope I'm not too much of a disappointment," he said wryly.

Parvok twitched his lips in mild amusement. "No," he said. "You're… not as insufferable as I expected. The Federation has a reputation for smug superiority, but you're not like that."

"Maybe I am," said Julian, tilting his head towards Tain; "and you've simply been inoculated by worse."

The snort of laughter surprised from Parvok was louder than Julian had expected. General Martok stirred, and Kalenna murmured something out of the depths of her uneasy dreams. Parvok clamped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide with chagrin. When he lowered it, he was genuinely smiling.

"Now he," he said; "is  _everything_  I expected from a Cardassian."

Julian nodded to preserve the feeling of camaraderie, but he was now keeping one uneasy eye on Tain. The Major and the General had both reacted to the sound of Parvok's laughter, but Tain had not so much as stirred. Either he was so deep in sleep that no noise could trouble him… or he was not sleeping at all.

"You should try to get some rest," he advised Parvok. "The night will pass more quickly if you sleep through it."

Parvok sighed and nodded gloomily. "I wish I could sleep right through 'til rescue comes," he muttered. "Do you think he'll finish the message soon?"

Julian forced himself to nod resolutely. "He will," he declared.  _He'll have to_ , he thought.

The Romulan looked unsure. "He's lost a day's work," he hedged.

"He'll make it up," said Julian. "I have a feeling that tomorrow, Tain will be more driven than ever."

Parvok nodded unsteadily. "Sleep well, Doctor," he said. The cot rattled and squeaked as he lay down, flinging his blanket over him and trying to plump up the desiccated little pillow.

"And you," Julian said wistfully. It was a tiny moment of normalcy that called to mind countless other occasions when he had heard those words from other lips. Parting ways with Captain Sisko in the officers' quarters corridor on board the  _Defiant_ , taking his leave from Quark's after a late night of revelry. Passing Odo on the Promenade, as he left the Infirmary and the Chief of Security returned to his office after an uneventful patrol. Sharing a turbolift with Garak at the end of a long day. Miles or Jadzia would have said  _Julian_  instead of  _Doctor_ , and Jadzia customarily wished him sweet dreams, too, as if offering some secret talisman, but the sentiment was much the same — and the ache of loss certainly was. Before waking in the internment camp, Julian had never imagined that homesickness could be so truly, viscerally painful, but it was. It was awful. His vision blurred behind a film of lachrymal fluid, and his throat burned with more than thirst.

Maybe it was because he finally had a home to miss. Julian remembered his elementary school years as a time of rootlessness, never sleeping in the same bedroom for more than a few months, changing schools every other term, keeping mostly to England or cities with a well-established British diaspora despite his mother's North African roots. His father's year as a custodial attaché at the embassy on Invernia II had been the longest period of time the Bashir family lived anywhere, until they came back to Earth from New Berlin, and settled in Guildford, about fifty kilometres from Central London. Julian — then still seeing no reason not to live under the name name he'd been given at birth — had been instantly enamoured of the town, begging his parents to promise him they would stay. They'd agreed, reiterating over and over that they were done moving around; they wanted him to have continuity for secondary school, so that he could settle in, focus on his studies, and, in his father's perpetual parlance, "live up to his potential". What Jules hadn't realized was that the reason they were able to stay in one place at last was that he was finally old enough to justify his level of accomplishment. At twelve, a child who could read at a university level and perform standard calculus proofs was a prodigy. At eight or nine, such a child was an aberration. And of course, by twelve, he'd had years of careful sculpting and coaching (by his mother) and conditioning by verbal castigation (yelling, by his father) to break him of telltale shortcuts so that he always showed his work and made it plain that he bought his excellence through honest effort. "Honest" effort.

When at fifteen, Julian had learned that his whole life was built on a lie, on a fraud, on a criminal conspiracy, it had destroyed his delusion of a normal family. It had prompted a thorough inventory of his life up to that point, and neither parent's behaviour had stood up well to that kind of scrutiny. Angry, disillusioned and terrified, Jules had served out his last couple of years under their roof like a sullen convict awaiting parole, and he had left for San Francisco three weeks before muster. He hadn't made any arrangements for temporary lodgings, and had spent two nights sleeping on couches in the Academy library before a lieutenant commander from Academic Support Services had caught him at it. Julian had expected a reprimand — or worse, to be sent back to his parents in disgrace, his Starfleet career over before it began. Instead, the man had seemed to find it funny. He had teased Julian good-naturedly about his overeagerness, and found him temporary accommodations in one of the summer-empty dormitories until the term began.

During the first few weeks of basic training, while his classmates pined for home and haunted the subspace frequencies, or used up a month's transporter credits for off-campus excursions running home every couple of days, Julian had been so blissfully happy to be where he was, half a hemisphere away from Richard and Amsha Bashir. He had missed some things about Guildford: the centuries'-old houses, the cobbled side streets, the scenic parks, the local delicacies. But he had never been homesick. He didn't have a home.

Nor had he thought of San Franciso that way, either. For all of his eight years in the steep, windy city — four in officers' training, obtaining his first degree, and four at Starfleet Medical Academy — he had known his time there was limited, his residence temporary. That attitude had been subtly reinforced in dozens of ways, by barracks life in his first month and living with a roommate for his first year of each program; by getting a fresh room assignment every autumn, by the frequent absences from campus (and even from Earth) for practicum placements, internships, residencies; by the fact that Julian had not once had quarters with a replicator; or how, even after eight years, he'd still gotten lost trying to navigate the Tenderloin district. San Francisco had been a haven for him, but it had never been a home.

Deep Space Nine was different. There, Julian had an Infirmary he had built up himself out of a ruined hole in the wall. He had quarters where he had lived for five years, settling into his space as he had never settled anywhere before, rearranging and adjusting and reimagining until everything was exactly as he liked it. More importantly, he had a community. Not merely colleagues he liked and trusted, of which he'd he'd also had a handful at Starfleet Medical Academy: true comrades, even confidantes (within obvious limitations). He had real friendships of the kind that had withstood time and adversity and even profound conflicts of philosophy. Those friendships were deep and precious to him: so different from the collegial amity he'd had with Erit and a few other classmates, the closest simulacrum of friendship he'd known in his youth. On Deep Space Nine, Julian was a part of a team, but it went deeper than that. He felt like part of a family, or what he imagined a real family must be. Being cut off from all of that here, when most he needed the support of those he'd learned to trust with his life and his heart — though never his secret — was almost unbearable.

"How flattering to know you place such faith in me, Doctor," a low, dry voice intoned, almost singsong. "I'll make up the lost day, will I? Just like that?"

Julian blinked his eyes clear and focused on Tain. He was doing that unnerving thing again: keeping his face almost completely slack even as he spoke, eyes closed and hands still resting on his chest. It was a little like talking to a waxwork, or a reanimated corpse.

"I think you will, yes," Julian said. "I think you'll be back inside that wall as soon as ration call is over tomorrow."

"Not before?" asked Tain silkily. "I  _could_  get back to work as soon as we disperse after the count, you know, Doctor. Every hour is precious."

"I don't advise it," Julian said. He knew that Tain didn't respect his medical opinion, and wouldn't heed it unless it happened to align with what he intended to do in the first place, but felt the need to express it anyway. "You need to conserve your strength until you've eaten and had some water. Cardassians may be almost as well adapted to conserving their body water as Romulans are, but half a litre isn't enough to keep you fit, and you know it as well as I do."

"Ridiculous!" scoffed Tain, and his face finally taking on some semblance of life — at least enough for a thin sneer. "Cardassians are biologically superior to Romulans in every respect. Your pointless hobby should have taught you that much by now. You've been wandering the camp, diagnosing every Romulan you meet with what? Weak blood. And all because they're not getting enough of one tiny little ion. Whereas the Cardassians—"

"Are suffering from a deficiency I can't identify, at least not yet," Julian said coolly. He knew Tain was trying to get a rise out of him, to prod him into another impassioned defence of his patients. He was in no mood to indulge the man. "I wouldn't take too much pride in that, Enabran. It's liable to kill all of you in the long run."

Tain's near eye opened in mild surprise, which meant Julian had astonished him. The Cardassian hid it behind a thin chuckle. "Oh, we won't be here long enough for me to die of  _terat rol_ , Doctor. Though I'm pleased you think that might be the way my life ends, ignominious though such a death would be."

He was thinking of his heart, and Julian found that curiously reassuring. Tain loved to make a show of treating him like a nuisance when he checked it, and his blustering dismissiveness sometimes made Julian fear he might not be taking his condition seriously. Right now, at least it was on his mind. And it might give Julian's recommendation more weight.

"If you wait until after ration call, you'll work longer and more efficiently," he said. "But I also think you know that already, and you'll do what suits you regardless of my opinion."

Tain laughed; not a brief chuckle this time, but a low, rumbling laugh that seemed to go on far too long. Long enough, anyway, to make the fine hairs on Julian's forearms stand on end beneath the grimy sleeves of his uniform

"You're convinced you have my measure, aren't you, Doctor?" he asked. "We'll see."

Julian let him have that one. He was too worn down to keep sparring. He simply fell silent and, eventually, Tain did as well.

 _(fade_ )

By the time the door lock released, Julian could scarcely hold a thought in his head. The world had contracted to the needs of his deprived body. Thirst had not blunted the hunger, but seemed only to intensify it. His lips were dry, cracking at the corners with a shallow, stinging pain much harder to ignore than the bruised tenderness where Martok had struck him. His tongue felt swollen to twice its natural size, and he could taste the rancid stickiness of his breath. Waking to that was almost as miserable as his first awakening in the camp had been. His brain was sluggish and dessicated, every muscle in his body ached, and as he sat up, a sickening muscle cramp rippled through his back and flank. Deep beneath it, his left kidney was throbbing again.

Martok was out the door almost before the yellow glow faded from the panel. Tain was already on his feet, smoothing his garments as fastidiously as if he had donned them fresh that morning, instead of subsisting in their filthy layers for a year and a half. Kalenna briskly made her bed to inspection standards, and then turned her attention to Martok's, replacing the mattress first. As Julian hauled himself slowly to his feet, trying to fight off the nausea of borderline hypoglycemia, the Breen got off of their cot and set about putting it to rights, too.

Parvok was bowed over Tain's bed, working expertly. Julian stood wearily, one hand braced against the wall as he watched the Sub-Lieutenant, and wondered how any of them could have been so unfair as to suggest Parvok was to blame for their lockdown. He had only just picked up his own blanket when the Romulan man came to him, taking one side so that they could make quick work of folding it.

Julian started for the door when they were finished, thinking singlemindedly of the sanitizing alcove in the waste reclamation room. Thirty-four hours without washing his hands left him feeling vile and inhuman. But Parvok plucked at his sleeve and nodded to the back of the room.

"We can't leave it there," he said, staring at the cargo container. "We'll fail inspection again if we do."

Julian's intestines felt suddenly watery with the dread of their near miss. Another day without water would be too much for his body to bear — to say nothing of how Tain's heart would carry the strain of a longer fast, or whether Martok's iron will could even hope to bear up under the psychological barrage.

"Under the bed?" Julian said hoarsely.

Parvok nodded. "I'm sorry, Doctor: there's no choice."

Julian didn't like the idea of his already foul-smelling bedding steeping in the fumes of their improvised latrine, and he doubted the Dominion's decontamination sweep was programmed for such luxuries as odour management. But he knew there was no choice. "Help me?" he asked.

Between the two of them, they pushed the case along the seamless stone floor. Julian tried to ignore the slosh of the festering slurry inside. Once they had it aligned, Parvok moved to shove it under the cot, but Julian shook his head. He didn't know whether the decontamination cycle would penetrate parsteel or not. Some of those he could run in his own Infirmary would, and others wouldn't. He didn't want to return to the barracks to find the mess still there. He had no idea how they would cope with it if it was, and the truth was that he wanted the use of the case again. That wasn't rational, perhaps: the few medical supplies he possessed barely coated the bottom. But in this place of scant resources, everything seemed precious — even the continued use of a box he couldn't fill to capacity.

Parvok clamped his hand over his mouth, pinching his nose as Julian lifted the lid and swung it to lie flat. He offered only one hand to aid the doctor in pushing the open container into place. Once it was under the bed and out of sight, Julian sat back on his knees. Belatedly, he snagged his two canteens from under the bed. They were bone dry and would presumably be sterilized by Arat'zuma for tomorrow's ration call, but it still seemed a grievous violation of good public health practices to leave drinking vessels next to a cesspit.

He put his bottles under Martok's cot instead, next to the Klingon's own. The medical supplies, which had passed the night on one of the tables, Julian hid beneath Kalenna's bunk, in the corner nearest the door. Then he surveyed the room carefully, looking to Parvok for confirmation. Everyone else was already outside.

"Up to the required standard?" Julian asked. His voice rasped and his throat stung.

"Yes," said Parvok. "You should go out. I'll be along when the alarm sounds."

He meant to stand guard, in case someone tried to slip into the barracks after they left it, to sabotage their efforts again.

"I'll wait with you," Julian said in reflexive solidarity.

Parvok shook his head. "Go. I'll have to run to make the count in time, and you shouldn't be running. You're as grey as the Jem'Hadar as it is."

Julian's hand went automatically to his cheek, fingertips brushing the bruise where Martok had struck him. He hesitated, but had to nod his acknowledgement of Parvok's wisdom. He was going to find it difficult enough to stand for the count, dizzy with inanition as he was. He couldn't afford undue exertion.

He had enough time to go down to the end of the pod and sterilize his hands, ignoring the men on the toilets. He didn't feel the need to avail himself of them: he probably wouldn't be able to pass any urine until a few hours after ration call, with his body as dehydrated as it was. He hadn't felt the urge since not long after curfew. But it felt good to clean his hands, even though the decon device was profoundly unsatisfying and lacked the simple consolation of soap and water. Julian made his way out into the atrium, one palm resting now and then on the wall of the corridor as he steadied himself. His knees wobbled and his head swam.

Julian supposed he should repent of his smugness at the idea that his body wasn't the perfect construct his parents had wanted. He couldn't bring himself to do so, even when his first act upon reaching the atrium was to retreat to the pillar nearest the arena so he could lean heavily against it to rediscover his centre of gravity. Even when the shriek of the klaxon sounded, and he had to muster into the line with the rest of the prisoner population. Even when Deyos began his leisurely count and Julian felt the first wave of fasting nausea wash over him, leaving him clammy and unsteady. For seventeen years, he had grappled with his father's unrepentant arrogance. It was profoundly satisfying to have a new way to undercut it, even if Richard Bashir didn't know about it. Even if he might  _never_  know about it. In some ways, Julian had never stopped having that first horrible, horrified, hot-blooded argument that had destroyed his boyhood world, his father bellowing, his mother pleading, his own unreliable adolescent voice by turns raging and sobbing and screaming. This felt like a fresh victory in that argument, and it was perversely satisfying.

 _Talk sense, Julian_ , a voice in the back of his head scoffed. It sounded like Miles O'Brien, his pragmatic Irish inflection tinged with exasperation.  _Isn't that a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face? It's not your father who's suffering because of this. What the hell do you have to be pleased about?_

 _You don't understand_ , Julian thought back, as on the far side of the atrium, Deyos dropped the count with glee and meandered back to the beginning of the line.  _All these years, he's acted like he did me such an enormous favour. "It was for your own good, Jules." "Saved you from misery and mediocrity, Jules." As if everything I have, everything I am, I owe to him. To them. But this? This is…_

It was a survival disadvantage, that's what it was: not so different from the Cardassians' inability to maintain their core body temperature when the environment grew too cold, or the Breen's reliance upon their cooling suit. One of the most awful, demeaning things about his genetic history was the way it made Julian feel less than human. There was nothing more human than imperfection, except perhaps compassion.

Julian's eyes travelled to the right, his head turning ever so slightly so he could seek out the Breen's duckbilled profile further down the line. Tain was in his usual place behind Julian, and the Romulans had found coveted spots in the back row. Julian had been tempted to seek refuge there, instinct telling him it was best to do whatever he could to avoid drawing notice. But his tactician's mind, the part groomed in officers' training at Starfleet Academy and honed by his slender years of experience in the field, told him that trying to hide would have the opposite effect. It wouldn't make him less conspicuous: Deyos would be on the lookout for him anyway. It would only telegraph to the Vorta that Julian was cowed, frightened, and desperate to avoid further punishment. Either Martok thought the same, or his sense of honour required him to stand by his friend even in recklessness: he stood at Julian's side, straight and tall and resolute. And on down the line, the Breen also stood in the front row, immovable and steady.

It was strange, the thoughts a half-starved brain could cook up while trying to distract itself from thirst, and giddiness, and the tremors in tired, cramping legs. Julian wondered what powered the Breen's refrigeration suit. They didn't seem to have a need to recharge: he had never observed the guards providing any means to do so. Yet the band of coloured lights never ceased its flickering, and the respiration device hissed and puffed quietly day and night. The display panel on the Breen's forearm had been bright and legible yesterday. The suit was obviously doing its duty tirelessly.

Did it run on a nuclear battery, Julian wondered? A small pellet of plutonium or neptunium could power a personal life support unit for decades, perhaps even centuries. He thought it would be small enough to allow for air cooling, but his mind couldn't seem to tackle the calculation just at present. It was possible the suit had some type of photonic microgenerator, using the ambient light to sustain function. The grey indifference of the prison's illumination probably didn't supply enough energy for optimal power production, but at least it was constant. If the Breen relied on light, maybe they were the only person in the prison grateful for the sustained monophasic gloom that Julian's training insisted was as detrimental to the prisoners' circadian rhythms as the thirty-four hour daily routine. Perhaps moreso.

He speculated for a while about the workings of the Breen's refrigeration suit, and then about the body that lay beneath it. It was an idle puzzle, and one without an obtainable solution, but it provided a welcome distraction as Deyos dropped and restarted the count again and again, slowly inching his way up the far line only to stroll back down to the beginning again and again. He was dragging out the count longer than he had since Julian's first week in the prison, when he'd made the imprudent decision to correct the Vorta. In another, half-forgotten life of freedom and plenty, Julian would have thought himself paranoid for believing this to be for the sole benefit of the beleaguered residents of Barracks 6. Now, he didn't even question it. Deyos knew what he was doing, and what Julian and his cellmates were suffering. He was taking his pleasure in it.

Eventually, Deyos reached one hundred, standing before the pair of men exactly opposite Julian and Tain. It was then that Julian, blinking bleary eyes, bothered to look at the faces of the Jem'Hadar escort, and his diaphragm hitched uneasily. Yesterday, the Second's absence from the count had presaged calamity. Today, Boran'itrex was present, but on the wrong side of the Vorta. He stood in the First's place, and the Third was in his. Today, it was Ikat'ika who was missing from the usual escort.

Julian wondered what this might mean. He was too well indoctrinated into the miseries of Internment Camp 371 to believe it could possibly be anything good. But before he could start his careening descent into a spiral of worst-case scenarios, Deyos turned and strode across the atrium towards him. As always, he cut straight through the combat ring, while the Jem'Hadar circumnavigated it with dispassionate respect.

As the Vorta approached, his unctuous smile broadened. "Well, well, Doctor," he drawled, raking cold eyes over Julian. "You've rejoined our little community, I see. Have you learned the proper gratitude for the lodgings the Dominion provides you? Will you care for them more diligently in future?"

Julian met his gaze as steadily and unreadably as he was able. Deyos scoffed softly and reached to pluck at Julian's split lip. The little burst of stinging pain was nothing to the humiliation of the gesture, but he tried to bear up under both.

"What happened  _here_?" Deyos gasped with feigned dismay. "Oh, dear. Trouble among the ranks? I  _do_  hope no one singled you out as the cause of their misfortune, Doctor."

Behind Julian, Tain was listening to all of this. He'd already voiced his theory as to what lay at the root of their misfortune, but he'd eventually tired of harping on it. Julian didn't want to reawaken the Cardassian's accusations.

Deyos's fingertip was moving along his lip now, an hideous invasion. Julian was once more struck by the uncanny smoothness of the Vorta's skin, as if he had no papillary ridges at all. It brushed against the cracks and flakes of torn stratum corneum. Julian could not help jerking back a little, repulsed by the violation.

Deyos laughed coldly, and then closed a fist on the front of Julian's high-necked undershirt. He yanked him forward so that Julian had to resist the urge to take a step out of the ranks. His nose almost brushed that of the Vorta.

"Shy, are you, Doctor? All of a sudden?" he hissed, so that only those nearest to them could possibly have heard. "You let Tiellyn touch you as she pleased, but you shrink from me? Do I  _disgust_ you? How hurtful!"

Tiellyn's touch had disgusted Julian, too, but he had been too overcome by pain and helplessness to resist her. And loath though he was to admit it even to himself, he was terrified right now. He had pulled away instinctively, but he dreaded the cost of that act of involuntary defiance. He didn't want to make the situation worse, but he couldn't see any way to placate the Vorta without making obeisance. Julian didn't want to do that, no only for his own sake but for the morale of those around him; all of the other prisoners trying to hold onto their dignity and their sense of self in this hellish place. But silence was defiance, also, and if he was going to be punished for insolence, he wanted the meagre satisfaction of getting in a barb or two beforehand.

"Perhaps you should check your Intelligence database," he suggested coolly. "Surely the Founders have gathered enough cultural information on humans to understand how we feel about our lips. If not, my replacement must have had a  _very_  hard time getting by without incurring a harassment complaint."

Someone was surprised into a sharp but very quiet snort of surprised amusement. It took Julian a dizzy moment to realize it was Enabran Tain.

Deyos's eyes narrowed, but he released Julian's front with a sneer of disdain, and stepped back half a pace. "Guard!" he called, beckoning to the far end of the atrium.

Julian braced himself, trying to prepare his legs to trot along after the Jem'Hadar summoned to seize him. But instead, the approaching soldier was carrying something: a tray with a ribbed gold flagon, and a matching fluted cup. Julian was so startled by the spectacle that he didn't immediately recognize the bearer as Arat'zuma, whose hand was now as good as new.

"Counting is thirsty work, don't you find?" Deyos drawled. He picked up cup and flagon, and poured a measure of dark liquid. It rang musically as it fell, the sound absolutely maddening to the ears of those who had subsisted for a day and a half on less than half a litre of water each. Julian wanted to close his eyes and to look away, but he didn't dare. Then the scent hit his nostrils: a fruity, syrupy fragrance with a bright tang to it. His mouth tried to water, but it was too dry. His stomach clenched and his head ached. But the irrational yearning he felt for that fluid went beyond the torments of hunger and thirst. He felt a deep, primal urge to drink, to drain the cup as quickly as possible. His hand twitched at his side, his mind already envisioning the act of snatching it from Deyos's taunting hand.

But self-control won out. Rationality over instinct. Julian knotted his fingers into an impotent fist as Deyos swirled the glass under his nose. He jerked his head a little higher, black spots dancing in his field of vision. He pressed his raw, thirst-chapped lips together.

"Rippleberry juice," Deyos said with relish. "A particular delicacy for the Vorta. Are you sure you wouldn't like to try it, Doctor?"

Julian did want to try it. Every cell in his body seemed to be reaching for it. But he fixed his face in stony lines and his eyes on the oblique border of Deyos's hairline. He wasn't going to give the Vorta the satisfaction of witnessing the depth of his need, and he knew he wouldn't be allowed to taste the fragrant concoction no matter how he abased himself. He wouldn't fall for that trick.

Deyos sighed regretfully. "Suit yourself. Klingon? A full day without food or water… that must try the heart of the staunchest warrior."

Julian dared a glance at Martok. The General's dry lips twitched almost imperceptibly. It was difficult to read his expression from the left, where his ruined eye socket gave no clues, but Julian thought he sensed proud contempt. Klingons often participated in ritual fasts, Julian knew. The privation of the last thirty-four hours had not been Martok's great burden.

"No?" Deyos feigned disappointment. Coldly, he said, "What about you, Ancient One?" It took Julian a moment to realize he was addressing Tain.

"If you like," the Cardassian said lazily, as if this was all so inconsequential to him. Julian had to admire the man's tactic. He gave every appearance of caring not at all whether he drank or not, while at the same time leaving the opportunity open for himself if Deyos was by some slim chance sincere in his offer. "I find the foods of alien worlds fascinating."

Deyos's eyes blazed in short-lived rage. "Well, then," he scoffed. "You can wait for your  _fascinating_  ration, like everyone else." He flicked an idle finger at Tain and Julian as he sipped from his cup. "Two," he said, then moved on to Martok. "Four. Six…"

 _(fade_ )

When the count was finally over and the prisoners were given leave to stand down, Julian stumbled out of his rigid posture and almost fell towards the pillar. He clutched it as he sank to his knees, clammy and nauseous and befuddled. He had spent the last unknowable span of time fighting off the urge to faint as Deyos dallied through his paces. Martok came to him, reaching out a stiff arm to offer aid, but Julian shook his head.

"I'll be fine in a minute," he huffed, bracing against the pillar with one arm while the other twisted a fistful of black fabric over his knee. "How long was the count?"

He had lost all sense of time, struggling to keep his feet after the Vorta moved on. Julian knew he had held up better than he had the last time he'd missed a ration call, but he was still embarrassed and above all, frustrated. The shine was rubbing off of yesterday's epiphany. He wished his damned body would obey him.

"Three and a half hours? Perhaps a little less," said Martok, surveying the chaos of the dispersing crowd. "Not long to wait now, Doctor. Soon you can have water."

Julian nodded hazily, still trying to get his bearings. Hard boots sounded on the stone, and he had to fight the urge to shrink against the pillar. A Jem'Hadar.

"Prepare yourself, Klingon," he said coldly. It was the Third. "You will be expected in the ring today. You have had enough rest. Now it is time for combat."

Martok let out one of his low, rumbling hisses that Julian had learned were an expression of grim resolve and battle-readiness. "Gladly," the General growled with relish.

"Oh, I think not," an idle voice drawled. It was Deyos, near at hand. "No combat for the Klingon today, or tomorrow, either. You men will have to take your entertainment elsewhere." Julian could hear the cruel smile in his voice as he said; "As for the prisoner, he'll just have to find some other way to make himself feel worthy again.

Julian sensed rather than heard Martok's surging rage. "General!" he said sharply, flinging up his arm into the empty space that he couldn't quite bring into focus. Martok turned to him, sharply jolted out of his intent to lunge for the Vorta. "Would you help me stand up, please? I don't think I can manage without some assistance."

"Pitiful," spat Deyos boredly, but Julian heard him stroll off.

"Three days, then," said the Third curtly. "I will inform the First."

He, too, moved away. Martok helped Julian rise with remarkable gentleness, but when he was finally upright and able to blink away the worst of the bleariness, Julian saw the furrows of fury mapped across the Klingon's craggy face.

"Three days!" he growled. "I had hoped to avenge this outrage today!"

Julian nodded tightly, knowing it was unwise to move his head with too much vigour while it was still swimming. It wasn't vengeance Martok wanted, but a means of cleansing himself of the lingering anxiety of their prolonged lockdown. But before he could offer any words of courage, there was a rumble of commotion on the far side of the yard.

Prisoners who had been retreating to their barracks to gather their canteens for ration call now hesitated, turned, and shuffled back, gathering into nervous clumps. They were all watching the door beyond the administration pod, wary and silent. That way lay the airlock, the kitchen and the cargo bays. Something else tripped in the back of Julian's mind, a crossed signal from his earliest days in the camp. Transfixed, he slipped free of Martok's guarding hand and started slowly towards the onlookers.

"Doctor?" Martok said, but his voice was distant. Julian's brain was putting together the pieces, but his consciousness couldn't quite grasp them through the fog of insidious hunger. All that propelled him was instinct and an ineffable certainty that he was needed.

Julian was still twenty metres away when two Jem'Hadar appeared in the doorway, driving forward a prisoner with a savage shove of a rifle butt. The man, a haggard Cardassian, stumbled weak-kneed away from the blow to his shoulder-blades. He was blinking blindly, dazed and trembling. He lurched away from the Jem'Hadar and then crashed to his knees, palms splayed and no doubt scraped raw on the composite floor.

A murmur snaked through the crowd of observers, but no one moved. Julian froze for an instant, looking at the man who was clearly incapable of defending himself. He remembered his own first day in the camp, and how he had been set upon in just such a moment of vulnerability. He didn't pause to think, to consider whether he could afford to expend such energy in his present state. He simply broke into a run, elbowing between two knots of watchers and skidding to his knees just short of the fallen man. He was already reaching out a sheltering hand as he landed. His head was spinning and the black spots were back, but he scarcely felt his own body's travails. There was a patient in front of him, unable to stand, arms trembling as they braced him, eyes wild and bewildered and shocked.

"I'm Doctor Bashir," Julian said hurriedly. "I can help you. Will you let me help you?"

The Cardassian blinked at him, his two sets of eyelids moving in syncopated discord. "The Starfleet doctor," he rasped, his voice grinding gravel.

Then Julian realized his initial assumption was false: this wasn't a new prisoner at all. The other parts of his mind, more rational, finally rendered the verdict of their busy deductions.  _They've just brought him out of solitary confinement_.

"You've been in isolation?" Julian asked.

The Cardassian's prominent cervical musculature twitched. "How long?" he breathed. His chest was heaving, and Julian saw now that several of the clasps on his armour were twisted, as if he had dressed hurriedly and clumsily. His boots were on the wrong feet.

"I don't…" Julian began, but a solemn voice from above cut him off.

"Three days, Glinn." Gul Nador squatted swiftly, forming a triangle with Julian and the other Cardassian. He planted a firm hand on the man's other shoulder. "You comported yourself well. Take pride in that."

The man looked up at him, eyes wide and horrified. "Three days?" he choked, then broke off in a thin cough that ripped through his whole body and up into Julian's arm. The doctor couldn't tell if the man was dismayed to know he had been shut away so long, or if he was shocked that it had only been three days.

"Let the doctor examine you," said Nador. "He may be human, but he knows his craft."

By Cardassian standards, this was a resounding endorsement. Julian crouched a little lower so he could catch the man's roving eyes. "Will you let me check your pulse?" he asked. With a glance at Nador, he asked; "Can you tell me what they do to prisoners in isolation?"

"He needs food," Nador said. "Warmth. Time to adjust to the light and to the presence of others. Take courage, Glinn," he added bracingly. "You are fortunate: they've released you before mealtime. Only half an hour to wait."

So his estimate meshed well with Martok's. Julian nodded once and asked again for permission to feel for the man's pulse. The Glinn nodded thinly, and Julian slipped his thumb up onto his temple, landmarking on the orbital ridge.

There wasn't much to be done: the man's initial disorientation seemed to fade, and eventually he sat back on his heels, drawing his hands onto his knees with palms upturned and head hanging. If he had injuries, they were not obvious. His pulse was quick but steady. His skin was very clammy. Julian's assessment wasn't much different from Nador's: the man needed food and rest.

He was just about to say as much when he felt a crawling sensation on the back of his neck: the feeling of eyes boring into him with piercing hatred. Julian turned warily, expecting to see one of the Jem'Hadar behind him. Instead, standing with feet broadly planted and arms crossed over his barrel chest, eyes blazing with castigating fire, was Enabran Tain.

( _fade_ )

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**papillary ridges:** the fine, textured ridges of the palmar surfaces of hands and feet, responsible for the formation of fingerprints.

 **stratum corneum:** the outermost layer of skin. On the lips, extremely thin and fragile, the part of the lips that flakes when they're dry.


	57. Tain's Hammer

_Note: It's late, but it's long. Cheers!_

**Part X, Act IV: Tain's Hammer**

As ravenous as he was, Julian expected to find it difficult to pace himself when at last he was allowed to eat. Just the opposite proved true. The colourless mush was more unappetizing than ever, and each mouthful tasted like rancid ash on his thirst-roughened tongue. He couldn't wash it down with water, which might have helped a little: though he had taken a drink as soon as he had a bottle in his hand, the two litres he had been given had to last until this time tomorrow. Besides, hydrating too rapidly really would make him ill, and Julian didn't want to chance that. So he forced down bitter fingerfuls of slop, and watched the hollow-eyed faces around him.

The Cardassian who had been released from isolation was on the far side of the mess area, slouched against the wall while two of his comrades helped him with his plate and his canteen. Gul Nador watched from a judicious distance, sternly approving. The Glinn clearly held some importance for him. Perhaps he was a longtime subordinate? A relative? A friend? Julian had not asked, and he supposed it didn't really matter. What concerned him was Enabran Tain's reaction to the scene in the yard. Who was this man to Tain, and what would his hatred of the Glinn mean for Julian?

He didn't need to wait long to find out. When the plates were empty, hungrily licked clean, the Jem'Hadar began to drive the prisoners back out into the atrium, and Julian started back for the barracks. The room seemed completely unchanged, with the same sour odour of unwashed bodies and old optronics on the air. The faint reek of sewage grew stronger as Julian moved towards his cot, but the cargo box beneath it was empty now, its foul contents obliterated by whatever decontamination sweep the Jem'Hadar had run. Relieved, Julian retrieved his medical supplies from under Kalenna's bunk and put them away.

The torn strips of blanket felt markedly less greasy than they had before, and Julian realized they, too, must be more or less aseptic at the moment. He wouldn't trust them to an open wound while he still had his few precious sterile pads, but he cursed himself for not having considered this possibility in the morning. He could have left his undergarments behind in the barracks, and returned to find them, if not clean, at lest less noxious than they currently were. He was beginning to get a rash in his axillae where the sweat-stiffened armholes of his singlet rubbed. He could expect similar irritation elsewhere if the situation continued. But the last thing he'd been thinking of as he staggered out to the count this morning had been laundry.

There was a scuffling of feet at the door, and Julian looked to see Tain blocking entrance to the others. "I need a word with the good doctor," he said, all false pleasantry and casual charm. "Two days without privacy — you understand."

Kalenna, Parvok, and the Breen stood in the corridor, stopped dead on their return. Martok was probably out pacing in the atrium, stretching his legs and trying to work off some of the combative energy he had amassed during the lockdown. The Romulan Major shot an uneasy look at Julian, clearly reluctant to leave him alone to Tain's mercies. Julian forced a small smile and nodded to show it was all right. If Tain wanted to talk about his heart, Julian owed him what discretion he could offer in this place. If he wanted to talk about the Glinn, the truth was that Julian was almost as eager for that conversation as he.

"We'll return in half an hour," Kalenna said. "I trust that will be long enough for your purposes?"

Julian reflected wryly that it was long enough for Tain to kill him, if that's what the Cardassian wanted to do. But he was grateful for Kalenna's firm assurance that she'd be near at hand. Tain chuckled.

"Haven't you seen enough of this room, Major?" he asked. His voice dropped low enough that only those standing very near would be able to hear him. He might even have thought it beyond the scope of Julian's ears. "Go on. And come back in a  _quarter_  of an hour. I'll need you to watch the door while the gracious young gentlemen help me with my bed. Time is fleeting."

Even in a whisper, he was judiciously oblique. But Kalenna understood his intention perfectly, and gave a tight military nod. "Fifteen minutes," she said, and she led Parvok off towards the end of the pod.

The Breen, however, took a stalwart step forward, squaring off almost helmet-to-nose with Enabran Tain. The Cardassian seemed to consider trying to stare them down, but then shrugged.

"Come in, then," he scoffed. "I can't be bothered to make you understand."

As he stepped back and the Breen entered, moving to stand rigidly between their cot and the Cardassian's instead of sitting down, Julian thought maybe the Breen understood better than Tain gave them credit for doing. Was it his imagination, or had his silent cellmate just taken up a bodyguard's stance?

Julian started to rise, but Tain rounded the bench with improbable stiffness and shoved him back down onto his knees with one imperious palm across his collarbone.

" _What_ ," he snarled ferociously; "is the nature of your dealings with Gul Nador?"

Julian couldn't quite hide his surprise. "Gul Nador?" he parroted pointlessly. "I assumed…" He stopped himself. Tain wouldn't care what he had assumed, and would disdain him for assuming anything at all. "I treated him when he was put in the ring," he said, forcing himself to sound cool and professional. "He's a participant in my nutritional study."

"Oh, yes, the  _nutritional study_!" Tain spat. "Everything must serve your  _nutritional study_. Tell me what he has said to you, Doctor. What he has asked of you.  _What you have told him_."

"Told him about what?" demanded Julian irately. His stomach was both paradoxically unsettled by the glutinous mass of his miserable meal, and aching for food. His head was still dully sore. His lip stung and his ribs ached where the straps of the cot had dug into them, and he wasn't in the mood to indulge Tain's games. "I'm not foolish enough to say anything about our plans outside this room, and you should know me well enough by now to be sure I'd never betray a medical confidence. What else do you suppose I know that anyone would be interested in learning?"

"No telling. No telling," Tain muttered, eyes suddenly shifty with paranoia. He fixed them back on Julian again, blazing. "And I don't expect  _you_  to be aware of Nador's motives, or to know whether you're being manipulated. He was the right hand of my successor, you know. The second most powerful member of the Obsidian Order, when I recruited him to join my mission."

Now, Julian thought he understood at least in part. He couldn't help the curl of his lip as he said dryly; "So he was your successor's Garak."

Tain's eyes flashed, but he nodded his bulldog's head. "Yes, if that's the only way you're capable of understanding it, Doctor. My successor's Garak. The man with the greatest cause to resent my return, once Drolek and Endran were dead."

Julian sifted his mind for the names, and they came to him quickly. Drolek and Endran. Two of the Obsidian Order operatives who had died of "accidents" during the purge that culminated in Garak's sabotage of his own shop. Strictly speaking, Julian hadn't been meant to be poking around in Odo's casefile. But it had been open on the PADD the Chief of Security was studying as he waited to be examined in the  _Defiant's_  medical bay after the rescue from the ruins of the Cardassian-Romulan fleet. In one idle glance, Julian had taken in the contents of the screen, including the names of Tain's former associates who had been assassinated to clear the way for his second ascent. Garak was to have been the sixth victim, but he had proved too clever for his old mentor. Tain had turned that fact to his advantage, but Julian could not help but wonder how deep his resentment ran. Enabran Tain was not a man who coped well with failure.

"If you fear his resentment, why did you recruit him for your invasion in the first place?" Julian asked carefully.

Not carefully enough. Tain's expression darkened. "I do not  _fear_  Nador!" he snapped, and Julian had to fight the instinct to flinch. Tain studied his face for a moment, and then sighed heavily. He took his bruising hand off of Julian's shoulder and heaved himself down onto the table. "I thought him worthy," he muttered. "He had access to ships, personnel. He had influence with the Central Command. Combat and espionage experience along the Demilitarized Zone. He had most of his master's power, without his master's arrogance. Or so I thought."

He shifted his weight onto one hip and planted his palms on his knees. "Since our capture, he has forgotten his loyalties. He has fomented discontent among the men. They follow  _him_  now, and why? Because he asks after their injuries and ensures the strong do not take food from the weak. Because he calls them prisoners of war and tells them they can keep their pride.  _I_ am the silent dagger of the night, the one whose name was the stuff of small children's nightmares, and the horror of the mightiest Legate, and yet they follow  _him_. It is unnatural."

Julian thought nothing could be  _more_  natural. In this place, of course the other Cardassians gravitated to the man who was cognizant of their needs, who encouraged them to hold onto their dignity in the face of Dominion cruelty. Tain's cold, imperious mastery held less sway here, where his power paled before the power of the Vorta, and the terror he commanded could not equal the constant daily dread of the Jem'Hadar. He thought about Nador, and his appreciation of the importance of getting to the bottom of the outbreak of  _terat rol_  among his men. He had not precisely been enthusiastic at Julian's approach, but he had been civil, and he had taken the problem seriously. His support had opened doors to barracks Julian would not have been able to coax into cooperation otherwise.

But he was not sure how much of this he wanted to express to Tain. "We were both concerned for the welfare of the man who'd been in isolation," he said instead. "That's all. It can't surprise you that I was unwilling to leave him there — or have you forgotten what you spared me on my first day here?"

"I forget nothing," Tain snarled. Then his lips curled into a predatory rictus of a grin. "Believe me, Doctor, I know  _exactly_  what you owe me. And now it's time for me to call in some of those favours. I want you to stay away from Gul Nador. You are not to visit his barracks. You are not to speak to him in the yard. You are not to make eye contact with him. If he approaches you, you are to make your excuses and extract yourself from the situation immediately. Do you understand me?"

Julian considered this. He had eight barracks left to survey, including the one that housed Trel Lugek's bereaved partner in crime. He did not know if he would have any success in Barracks 22, but he knew that with the names of Nador and Sub-Commander Darok behind him, he stood a good chance with the others. If he alienated Nador, he doubted many of the remaining Cardassians would cooperate. But it might be possible to do as Tain commanded, and distance himself from the Gul without actually forfeiting their loose allegiance. He could try to keep his distance, at least: Nador showed no interest in socializing with him, and certainly wasn't trying to poach Julian away from Tain.

"I'll do my best," he said finally, deciding he could try to toe that line. "It's not as if we're friendly, Tain. Nador and I just share a mutual interest in the welfare of the prisoners."

"No," said Tain. "You don't. Your investment is misguided, Doctor, but your motives are altruistic. I assure you Nador's are not. The men are his pawns, not his children. He has been using them to undercut my authority since the day we were brought to this forsaken place. But you will have to do a great deal better than your best to satisfy me. If I catch you fraternizing with Gul Nador, or hear of you keeping company with him, or so much as suspect you of duplicity, I promise you this: you will regret that betrayal of my trust all the days of your wretched life."

It was a hollow threat, and they both knew it. There was little Tain could do to Julian here, short of killing him. And Tain needed him. They all needed him, Nador included: that was the root of the problem. Julian was now certain he was the only physician on the asteroid, save during Tiellyn's brief visits. Even the Jem'Hadar needed him. He decided to let Tain enjoy his moment of menace, and refrained from pointing this out.

"Whatever you say," he sighed wearily. "I've got more than enough to cope with having  _one_  Obsidian Order higher-up in my life. I don't need two."

"See you remember that," said Tain sternly. Just then, the door snapped open, and Kalenna and Parvok came back. Tain looked at them, jovially determined. "Ah, Major!" he said sunnily. "Excellent. Time for me to get to work. The lost day won't make itself up."

He heaved himself to his feet. As he went, he patted the crown of Julian's head as if rewarding a loyal hound. At no point in his imprisonment, as his scalp grew greasier and began to itch and then to peel, had Julian felt such an acute need to wash his hair.

 _(fade_ )

For two days, Julian was able to abide by Tain's edict. He went about his business, surveying two barracks on the first day and four on the second. Only two remained: 22 and 24. He had yet to find any Cardassian who knew the specific deficiency at the root of  _terat rol,_ and again he found himself wondering how many officers on an average Starfleet vessel could have told him the cause of pellagra or marasmus. When scarcity was obliterated — or worse, endemic but brutally stigmatized, as had been the case during the Cardassian famines — the language surrounding it fell out of common use and into the realm of esoteric knowledge.

Julian was reminded of physiological conditions and diseases in human history that had been so knotted up in webs of shame and social revulsion that the people experiencing them were denied the means to communicate what was happening to their bodies. The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the last quarter of the twentieth century was one example, but there were others. The European taboos surrounding menstruation had burdened those with uteruses for centuries. Mental illness had been shrouded in shame and euphemisms for almost as long. The Cardassian attitude towards  _terot rol_  seemed to fall along similar lines of acculturated disgrace. The powerful, like Tain and Nador, were deep in denial. Those who had grown up in poverty seemed grimly resigned to the diagnosis: they had suspected it for some time, and having it confirmed by a physician, even a human one, was like hearing a long-dreaded sentence. But none of them could describe it any more coherently than the first few patients Julian had examined.

Then there came a night when Julian awoke in the deep silence after curfew, not because of a nightmare or pain or even hunger, but because he was shivering violently. He sat up hurriedly, pulling his knees to his chest and wrapping his thin, scratchy blanket around himself like a cocoon, struggling to get warm again. It was impossible. The asteroid had moved into orbital night again, and the temperature had fallen almost ten degrees.

At the count that morning, the Cardassians were milky-eyed and dazed, and those members of species capable of shivering did so. Julian heard Martok's teeth grinding together as the General forced himself to stand perfectly still as faint puffs of vapour came from his nostrils with each breath. Hot-blooded Klingons had a very low tolerance for cold. When the count broke up, everyone was quiet and miserable. Tain slid back into the wall, working frenetically but also seeking the warmth of the wired-in transmitter. Julian busied himself in replacing the splint on Martok's finger with a soft co-dressing that would hamper him as little as possible. The Vorta's two-day prohibition on fighting was over: the General was to be allowed in the ring today.

From an orthopedic perspective, Julian didn't like the idea. He'd been glad of the unexpected respite for his patient's joints and ligaments. But as far as Martok's mental health was concerned, battle was long overdue. He had been restive and miserable for days now, unable to shake the vile sense of futile captivity that had been driven home so brutally by their long confinement to barracks. It was a miracle of self-control that he hadn't instigated a conflagration with one of the guards, or another prisoner. Even though it was going to prove painful, and he'd likely do further injury to his battered body, Martok needed the catharsis of the ring. Julian suspected his first opponent, at least, was doomed to defeat.

Yet when Martok emerged, Julian walking a pace behind him, there was already a prisoner waiting in the ring. It was Gul Nador.

The General froze, his whole body rigid with outrage at the sight. Julian's tongue was moving faster than his mind, and much faster than his prudence.

"Wait a minute…" he said, stepping forward and seeking out the first face of authority. It was Second Boran'itrex, but even that didn't silence him. "We were told General Martok was to report for battle today."

The Second sneered coldly at him, a curling of coarse grey lips that seemed to emphasize the savage visage of fissures and spines. "There has been a change of itinerary," he said. "Were you not informed?"

"No," Julian said frigidly. He stole a glance at Martok, whose expression was one of brewing fury. There was a glazed light of panic in his lone eye, too: he had been holding out, white-knuckled, for this moment, and now it seemed it had been snatched away once more. "Where's Ikat'ika?"

"The First is occupied elsewhere," said Boran'itrex with something akin to glee. "I am overseeing the men's training today, and I have decided they have more to learn if the Klingon is kept out of the ring."

He strode around the lighted lip of the arena, and Julian had never seen a Jem'Hadar move in a way that could be so rightly described as  _sauntering_. He looked Martok up and down with slow scorn.

"Ikat'ika believes you are still of use, Klingon," he said coldly. "I look at you, and I see a derelict unworthy of the attention of the Jem'Hadar. Go away: today, my men will fight the Cardassian. Perhaps  _he_  will prove worthy."

Julian could not begin to enumerate his objections. Nador had been out of the ring longer than Martok, but the Klingon had dislocated joints and the Cardassian had cracked ribs and less skill. Martok desperately needed the empowerment of the fight, even with the inevitable eventual defeat. And of course there was the selfish consideration: that Tain had forbidden Julian contact with Nador, but he could not refuse to treat him if he was in need. So much for keeping his distance.

He turned to Martok, bowing his head. "General, go," he whispered. "You don't need to watch this." It would be excruciating for the warrior to walk away, but standing idle while others fought would quite likely be unbearable.

Martok shook his shaggy head. "If you stay, I stay," he muttered through a clenched jaw. He tossed his chin proudly at Boran'itrek. "And  _you_  may reconsider, when the Cardassian proves too easy to subdue."

Julian cringed inwardly at this: it wasn't what Nador needed to hear just before his ordeal. But the Gul was stoic and silent in the ring, and when his first opponent approached, he moved at once into a combat stance. His reflexes were slowed by the cold, but he had not yet sunken into the almost inebriated stupor that awaited all the Cardassians in the coming days. He put up a good fight, flooring the young Jem'Hadar three times to two falls of his own, before finally striking the debilitating blow. Next, he faced the Ninth, and Nador was quickly dispatched. The Jem'Hadar, disappointed, dispersed. Some shot bitter glares at Martok as they went, as if they resented him for not giving them a better spectacle.

Julian waited only until the ring itself was clear, and then hastened to his patient's side. Nador was in agony, and it was a laborious process to get him to his feet and back to the barracks. Without Martok's aid, they never would have managed. Julian did what he could for him, but the transverse ribs that had been merely cracked in the bout ten days before were broken now. Two were displaced. Raking them back into an approximation of alignment was a laborious process for Julian, and an absolutely agonizing one for his patient. By the time Julian was able to bind the Cardassian's chest and to lay him down on the cot, Nador was drenched in cold sweat and half-delirious with pain.

Getting him back into his armour had been out of the question, so Julian feared for the man's ability to keep warm. The room was empty but for the Glinn who had been in solitary confinement, and he made no protest as Julian went from cot to cot, gathering the blankets to bundle around the Gul. Nador was already drifting into a stuporous doze. The binding would help a little, but Julian was not sure how the man was going to stand for the count.

He wondered if Nador had an implant like Garak's, designed to activate in the event of severe torture. Were they standard Obsidian Order issue, or something Tain had devised for his closest confidantes alone? Julian had never asked Garak, and he knew better than to sound out Nador. Even if he had such an implant, they couldn't be activated at will: Garak had been obliged to create a control device in order to turn his on when he wished to. Would standing for the count be torturous enough to trigger the thing, if Nador had one? Julian didn't know that, either.

He left the barracks when there was nothing more he could do, quietly reminding the Glinn where he could be found. The man who had been barely ambulatory yesterday now looked much the better for two ration calls and the company of his compatriots. He promised to fetch Julian if Nador had need, and stole an uneasy glance at Martok before leaning in to murmur quiet thanks for Julian's care. It was a haunting moment: a blatant reminder of how far Julian had integrated into the social structure of the prison. He didn't want to belong here: his whole being rebelled against the idea. But he couldn't deny he had carved out a place for himself.

He was too weary to face the last two barracks on his survey list. Julian went back to his own cell instead, and curled up under his blanket to shiver his way back to homeostasis. The atrium was colder than the barracks were, and he was chilled to the bone.

 _(fade_ )

He must have drowsed, because he woke up to the sound of Parvok thumping on the inside of the wall panel. It came loose, and Tain crawled out. Julian propped himself up on his elbow, trying to orient himself. Was this a mid-afternoon break to visit the waste reclamation unit, or was it time for curfew? Tain rose wordlessly, huffing and puffing as he brushed the top layer of dust and grime from the front of his jacket. Parvok replaced the panels, and Martok helped him move the cot, working one-handed.

"How long have you been in there?" Julian asked, just before Kalenna abandoned her lookout post at the door.

Tain looked at him in arch surprise. "Six hours," he said. "And I understand  _you've_  been up to your usual tricks today. Major, General, would you excuse us? It seems it's time for my check-up, and I'd really prefer not to have an audience."

The others left without question, even the Breen. How they understood that this was the time to depart, when a couple of days ago they had refused to be put off, Julian didn't know. But it was impressive. When the door closed at last behind Martok, and the human and the Cardassian were alone, Julian threw off his blanket and levered himself to his feet. He still hadn't learned how to do so elegantly: the pipe that formed the side of the cot always posed an obstacle.

"Have you been having angina again?" he asked, briskly professional. Tain wouldn't appreciate too much gentleness. "With the temperature falling again, I expect—"

"I warned you," Tain said. His tone was flat, almost without inflection. His eyes were dead as jevonite, and he had squared off with Julian like an obelisk of judgement. "I warned you to stay away from Nador."

"You warned me not to fraternize with him," said Julian levelly. He was tired of these games, of Tain pretending he could still wield terror over every person who passed through his shadow, and of everyone letting him do it. "I didn't. I gave him medical care. I don't think he spoke more than ten words to me the whole time, and every one of them was directly related to his injuries."

"Semantics!" Tain snarled. Then he resumed his deadly, affectless tone. "You gave him succour. You gave him your labour. You deferred to him and gave him  _care_."

"He's my patient," said Julian tightly. "Every prisoner in this camp is my patient, unless they refuse my help. I have a duty—"

"You have a duty to  _me!_ " snapped Tain. "To  _this_  barracks! To the effort to escape. You owe Nador nothing!"

Julian didn't let his blazing gaze waver. "I've been here almost a month," he said, not letting his brain face the fact that this was true only by the Dominion's reckoning. By the calendar he'd left behind, he had been here thirty-one days, but that thought was unbearable. "You've watched me treat people who have harmed me, who have tried to rob me. You've watched me treat allies and foes and strangers, and even the Jem'Hadar. You can't be surprised to learn that I refused to let Nador suffer without aid."

"No." Tain curled his lip in disgust. "No, I'm  _not_  surprised. Yours is a perverse nature, Doctor, constantly driven by your blind Federation ideals. You seem to think that if we all just be  _kind_  to one another, everything will work out in the end. You're deluded. Like a man brainwashed by a zealot. On my Cardassia, you'd be labelled mentally incompetent."

"Then I suppose we're both lucky I don't live on your Cardassia," countered Julian. He jerked his head sternly at the nearest bench. "Now sit down and take off your shirt, if you want me to check your heart."

Tain chuckled ruefully, breaking their embattled eye contact to shake his head in amused disbelief. "It's like talking to a hologram," he said. "No matter what, you always default back to your original position. All right, Doctor. I'll give you one more chance. Repudiate Nador."

"Or what?" Julian challenged, exasperated. "Just what exactly can you threaten me with? Death? It doesn't frighten me: the Jem'Hadar claim that's the only escape, and at the rate we're going with the transmitter, they're probably right! Torture? You've got limited means, and almost no privacy. I suppose you could trap me inside the wall somehow, but how will you explain to the guards where I've gone? Ikat'ika will notice my absence — the Second is constantly on the lookout for ways to torment me. And that's quite apart from what will happen when I fail to turn up for the count!"

He still didn't know the punishment for this, but he did know it wasn't visited on the missing prisoner alone. Julian had a feeling that whatever it was, failing inspection paled in comparison.

"I'm sorry, Tain," he scoffed. "I know it's a bitter blow to lose the thing you most prized. I'm willing to help you keep up the pretence of power, so long as no one is harmed. But I'm  _not_  afraid of you. There's nothing you can do to me, not here! That's hard to hear, I know, but it's…"

His voice trailed off. Instead of the look of shock or desolation he had been expecting, Tain was smiling. It was a narrow, poisonous smile quite unlike his usual grandfatherly grin, and it chilled Julian to the marrow. He felt his empty stomach do a flop of nervous dread, and his knees tried to tremble. He locked them, and refused to cower. But he could not find his voice.

"No," said Tain silkily, the lilting melody of his boisterous voice now a deep, minor chord of unspeakable menace. "There's not a thing I can do to you  _here_."

Julian's hand began to shake, and he balled it into a fist at his side, hoping Tain had not noticed. His eyes tried to flick to the door. He didn't know what was coming, but everything about Tain's countenance was triggering a primal response in Julian's amygdalae. These were the centre of instinct, of the flight-or-fight response, of what even expert neuroscientist still sometimes described most eloquently as "the lizard brain". The amygdalae had a key role in complex reasoning, but they were also the seat of some of the most elemental responses humanoids experienced in their environments. Evolutionarily ancient and highly attuned, they produced panic, rage, hypervigilance, and dread — even as they supported memory, rationality, and the ability to cope with stressors.

It was the darker hues that oozed from it now, telling Julian's whole body that he was in grave and inexplicable danger. And then Tain went on.

"But despite your snide remarks to the contrary, Doctor, I  _am_  almost finished with the transmitter," said Tain. "The conversion is complete. The message is programmed, wire by meticulous wire. Tomorrow after the count, I'll slip into the wall again for what I estimate to be no more than ninety minutes' work, to close off the transmission and start broadcasting on the subspace frequency you so  _generously_ gave me. By this time tomorrow, the message will be a hundred lightyears away. In three days, your Federation listening post will be sorting it into top priority for sending to the relay at the mouth of the Wormhole. I'm a little hazy on just how long it'll take to reach Garak, but once he lays eyes upon it, he'll recognize it in seconds. And then it is only a matter of time before he comes for me."

All of this should have been jubilant news. Julian should have asked why, with almost two hours still left until curfew, Tain didn't just get back in the wall and finish. Though to be fair, he knew the answer: Tain was exhausted, though loath to admit it, and he could not afford to make an error in his fatigue, not now that they were so close to success. Even so, the idea that the message would be out there in subspace by this time tomorrow should have made Julian's heart soar. Instead, he was still locked in the primal terror response, fighting his body's instincts to flee.

"We're going to be rescued, Doctor," Tain went on, malice and menace oozing from every syllable. He moved nearer to Julian without even seeming to take a step. He simply slithered as if by osmosis, leaning in so that the Starfleet officer could smell his rancid breath, cold though it was. "You're going to get to go  _home_ , to that precious station of yours, to all your little Federation friends who  _love_  you and  _admire_  you and  _respect_  you. Back to that quotidian little life you cherish so much, the one you dream about, the one you long for. Does that sound about right?"

Julian hated to hear these things, which he counted proof of his fragile humanity, spoken of with such mockery. He did love his friends, and he firmly believed they loved him, too. He tried to keep the daydreams at bay, because they only deepened his homesickness, but he'd be lying to himself and to Tain if he denied he had imagined coming back to them. By now, surely the Changeling had been exposed, and his comrades believed him dead. They'd be overjoyed to learn it was not so, just as they'd been overjoyed when he and Miles had been recovered alive from T'Lani III. And Julian yearned for that moment, as he'd yearned for few other things in his three decades of life.

But he wasn't going to say any of this to Enabran Tain. He held his tongue and fought his irrational panic.

"Yes, I thought so," said Tain. "You want to go home: it's only natural. And you want something to come home  _to_ , don't you?"

Julian didn't understand. Was Tain threatening his friends on Deep Space Nine, as he had threatened that Cardassian's family weeks ago? He couldn't expect Julian to be cowed by that: even at the height of its power, the Obsidian Order hadn't ever claimed credit for the assassination of Starfleet personnel. Some things were beyond their reach.

"Wouldn't it be a  _shame_ , after all you've done to return to them, if your precious crewmates turned their backs on you?" asked Tain. "Reviled you? Rejected you? Cast you off for the unnatural creature you are?"

Suddenly all of the air was gone from the room. Julian could not draw breath. He couldn't move, or speak, or think. Even his field of vision contracted to a black-rimmed pinion centred on the face of Enabran Tain. Disbelief and denial battled horror. The Cardassian couldn't be saying what he seemed to be saying. He couldn't know. He  _couldn't_.

Only, of course, he  _could_.

"I've always found it fascinating, actually, the Federation distaste for genetic engineering," Tain sang conversationally, suddenly once more channelling his façade of elderly charm. "You embrace medical and technological advances of every stripe, fostering innovation and embracing the new and the glorious — except when it comes to your own genes. Dozens of species, thousands of worlds, all living in harmony and sharing the bounty of your cultures with one another, and it all comes down to this:  _one_  species in all that diversity you so prize made a grievous error in judgement almost four hundred years ago, and an entire segment of scientific advancment is forever closed to the entire Federation. Does that seem fair?"

Julian knew his lips were gaping in an expression of slack-jawed horror. His eyes were wide. His pulse was racing at sixty, seventy-five, ninety beats per minute. No. Not this. Anything but this. He'd known Tain knew more about him than he liked, had known it since the moment on the Arawath Colony when the man had ordered him a mug of Tarkalean Tea. But  _this…_

His parents had hidden it, had obliterated all traces of the journey to Adigeon Prime, had falsified Julian's school records to replace the ones that noted things like  _Jules struggles with language comprehension_ and  _Jules needs more home support with learning his alphabet_. They had expunged the damning letter from his worried first grade teacher, who had tentatively advised the Bashirs to seek a consultation from an early childhood development expert to assess Jules for cognitive disabilities and developmental processing delays. They had cut off ties with friends and family and abandoned their life in the sunny little oasis town Julian remembered only in the haziest way (they had never answered his questions about the name of the place, or even which North African country it belonged to) for the rainy climes of his father's native England. They had done everything they could to conceal their crime and to erase the first seven years of their son's life, in the name of crafting a brave new future for him. And they had done all of that to hide this very truth.

To hide it from people who would never think to look, Julian realized, and his heart shrivelled to a cherry stone in his chest. To hide it from the trusting Federation, with its precepts of personal privacy and its lack of any internal surveillance of its citizens. The Federation, which  _could_  access your replicator records to learn your favourite beverage, but would never dream of doing so! The Federation, which taught a philosophy of personal excellence and collective betterment, and so would never look askance at a brilliant little boy who grew into a ready adolescent achiever and then into a gifted and successful young man. His parents had hidden the truth from the Federation.

The Federation. Not the head of the Obsidian Order. Not the most suspicious man in the Galaxy. Not Enabran Tain.

"I…" It was a word, technically, but it had the quality of an inarticulate animal sound. Julian could not muster his thought. His language centre appeared to be failing him for the first time in almost a quarter of a century. He still could not breathe.

"Other powers aren't so scrupulous, I assure you," mused Tain. "The Klingons… well, they couldn't manage it on their own — but don't tell Martok: you're not supposed to know that. And they're understandably reluctant to try again. But the Romulans have had remarkable success, or hadn't you noticed those sinus ridges they  _don't_  have in common with their closest genetic relations, the Vulcans? As for my people, we're cursed with a genome that's proved resistant to most contemporary methods of resequencing, though the research continues. But  _humans!_  Your DNA seems positively built for dabbling, and the fact that your species was doing it almost before they achieved manned space flight is proof of that. Yet you eschew it. Forbid it, in fact. Tell me, Doctor: is there  _anything_  more taboo in your culture than eugenics?"

Julian's head twitched from side to side, ever so slightly. It wasn't quite a shake of the head, but only a shuddering expression of his utter inability to process what was happening. He had so arrogantly claimed to be beyond Tain's power. He had claimed there was nothing that this man could do to him. But this…

Tain could destroy him. With a few judicious words to the proper authorities — to Starfleet Medical, or Starfleet Intelligence, to Internal Affairs, or JAG, or even just to Captain Sisko — Tain could rain down radioactive fire on everything Julian had built. His medical practice, his Starfleet career, his citizenship and his dignity and perhaps even his freedom: all of them could be stripped away if anyone so much as suspected the truth. A few words, and Tain could raze Julian's life to smoking ruins, as he had always feared it might be razed. It was incomprehensible — and yet it was also horrifically inevitable.

"I looked into your background, you see," Tain said idly, reminiscing contentedly. "I was curious about the brash young lieutenant who felt entitled to beam into my home unannounced. The initial dossier I drew up during your approach was all well and good: enough to give me a firm footing for our first meeting, and enough to surprise you. I think?" He looked at Julian as if pausing for confirmation. He got no further response than the dumbfounded look of desolate dismay, but he nodded in satisfaction and went on. "But after you left, of course I had to dig deeper."

"How?" Julian gasped, almost choking on the tiny word. His throat had clamped down and his respiration was still a very shallow and abstract thing. His hands and feet were numb, and not with cold: he was going into vasovagal shock.

"It wasn't that difficult," Tain said condescendingly, patting an arm that could scarcely feel his touch. "More challenging than I expected, I'll admit, but not  _difficult._  Your parents did a good job of covering their tracks. It had to be your mother's work, I think? Your father's spotty employment history seems to paint the picture of a bungler. Your counterfeit records are really first-rate, and the original files were erased so cleanly that I actually couldn't even access them without calling in some favours. You should be flattered, Doctor: I spent some of my treasured influence for  _you_."

Julian wasn't flattered. Someday, if he could ever breathe again, he might pause to feel a sense of violation at Tain's complete disregard for his privacy. But then again, did he even have a right to privacy? Internal Affairs wouldn't think so, if they got wind of even a rumour of genetic enhancement. They'd delve just as deep as Tain had, and though it might take them longer, they'd reach the truth eventually.

"I couldn't find  _any_  record of the travel at all, which is usually where people slip up," said Tain. "How  _did_  your parents get you to Adigeon Prime, anyway?"

Julian could not have answered even if he'd been capable of speech. He didn't know. He had gone to sleep in his bed one night, in the cool, bright room that overlooked the palm groves, and he'd awakened in a narrow berth aboard a vessel moving at high warp. He hadn't understood he was on a spaceship at all, until his mother had showed him a picture on the computer: the cabin had no windows. Nothing had borne markings he could identify from memory, either. He hadn't been allowed out into the corridor at all until their arrival on Adigeon Prime, and then he'd been too excited to see the planet and the aliens to pay any attention to the craft.

 _Fell asleep one place, awoke somewhere else being spirited away. Beginning to be a pattern in your life, isn't it_? a sarcastic inner voice drawled. Julian was appalled but not surprised to find that it sounded like his father.  _You really should pay more attention to your surroundings, Jules._

"I suppose it doesn't matter," Tain mused. "But I haven't answered your question, have I?  _How_? I presume you mean 'how did I work out what had been done'? It's simple, really. It would have been the first thing I checked, if you'd been a citizen of almost any other power in the Quadrant. The money, of course."

The money. His mother's money: the earnings amassed during her eight lucrative years working as a geological engineer on a dozen neutral worlds, updating and designing the massive inertial dampers that stabilized tectonically fragile planets. She had been preeminent in her field, highly sought-after and richly compensated. She had given up her interstellar business during her pregnancy, wanting to raise her baby on Earth. Julian wondered if she might have resumed her career within the Federation, perhaps even in cooperation with Starfleet, if he hadn't been born as he had — "challenged", in her careful parlance; "imperfect", in his father's wordless condemnation. Certainly it had been impossible after the enhancements: too many people in the field knew her, and might have asked questions. He wondered if she had ever felt the loss of her passion and the atrophy of her brilliance. He'd never asked her.

Her earnings, useless in the Federation's haven of plenty, had gone to fund the procedures on Adigeon Prime. Julian wasn't sure how they could have been paid for otherwise. The currency grants citizens could apply for if they wanted to transact business outside of the Federation were easily accessible if you wanted to finance a year or two on a planet like Invernia II, or a vacation to a neutral world. But the larger the requested amount, the more detailed the application. The top-drawer, all-but-perfect, full-scale treatment Julian had been given had cost every last isik, lek, darsek, and slip of latinum his mother had earned in her short but lucrative career. His parents never would have been able to get a grant that size without raising impossible questions.

"I might never have tracked it, either, if the initial deposits hadn't been in the Bank of Bolias," said Tain with a smug little shrug. "You do know it's the most notoriously insecure financial institution in two quadrants, don't you? It's that Federation naïvety again: you don't ascribe true value to currency, so you don't bother to protect it as jealously as everyone else does. But lo and behold: from Bolias to Ferenginar to New Sydney to Romulus, and from Romulus to the most prestigious hospital in the Adigeon capital. From there, everything else fell into place."

Tain smiled again, his expression grandfatherly and warm. Julian was far beyond taking any comfort or unease from that. He felt as if he were hovering half a metre behind his body, innured to physical discomfort, thought, and feeling alike.

"So you see, Doctor, if  _I_  can find this information, so can Starfleet. All they'd need is a nudge in the right direction," Tain said pleasantly, leaning in so their noses almost brushed. Despite his easy tone, his eyes blazed with exhilaration, and Julian could hear the rapid hammer of his heart. He was drunk on the thrill of his triumph. "If I were you, I'd give serious consideration to my behaviour from now on. I won't warn you again, and I won't be so forgiving the next time you disobey. If you want any sort of life to come home to when we get out of this hell, I suggest you take heed."

Then he turned on his heel and meandered for the door. "Now, I really do need to go and take my ease," he threw back over his shoulder. "The old bladder isn't what it once was, alas!"

Julian waited until the door closed. He stood frozen, counting off the seconds it would take Tain to lumber down to the end of the pod. He couldn't stay here. He couldn't bear to be in the barracks when the Cardassian came back. He did the only thing he could think of: when he was sure the coast must be clear, he ran for the door himself, and fled out into the evening-quiet atrium.

As he ran, he thought he could hear the pillars of his carefully constructed life crumbling and crashing to earth.

( _fade)_


	58. The Secrets of Our Hearts

_Note: Julian quotes Emily Dickinson's letter of Spring, 1862, to Mary Bowles. Also, now it's time to play "How Many Subtle Allusions To Other Trek Series Can You Find In This Chapter?" Good luck!_

**Part X, Act V: The Secrets of Our Hearts**

Julian couldn't think. He was propelled solely by instinct, out into the emptiness of the gloomy and bitterly cold atrium. Instinct wanted to flee as far from Tain as possible, but a dim voice of stilted reason begged him not to run for the far end where the Jem'Hadar would soon be gathering for the distribution of the Ketracel White. Habit more than self-preservation helped him cut a broad swath around the sentries mounting their usual positions. Stumbling almost blindly, Julian found his way to the mouth of the alcove where the miserable daily meal was distributed. He whirled around, thrust his shoulder-blades against the wall, and slid slowly down to the floor before his knees could give out entirely.

He was trembling to his core, his whole body quaking with shock and horror. Tain knew. He  _knew_. Worse still, he had threatened to make use of what he knew. All Julian's adult life, he had dreaded a moment like this: the moment when someone asked the wrong question or harboured the right suspicion, and his whole life disintegrated before his stricken eyes. But he had never imagined it would come this way: from the most feared head of the most feared spy ring in the Alpha Quadrant, and in the form of blackmail.

For it was blackmail; there was no other word to describe it. Tain was putting Julian in an impossible position. Avoiding Gul Nador socially or strategically was one thing. He had been making an earnest effort to do just that for the last couple of days. But asking him to withhold medical treatment was a hideous and impossible demand. It violated what had become the deepest guiding principle of Julian's life: his oath as a physician, and his obligation to provide care to anyone in need.

There was a chance Nador would not seek him out; Cardassians were proud and independent, and did not ask aid lightly. But it was a slim chance. The damage to his rib cage meant that he was in considerable anguish now, and the long night on the unyielding cot would do him no favours. It would be difficult for him to stand erect for tomorrow's count, and afterwards it seemed impossible that he would not need Julian to tend to him. At the very least, he would need his bandages tightened: they were not the sophisticated pressure dressings standard in every Starfleet medkit, but simply scraps of an old blanket. And there was a good chance that at least one of his transverse ribs would have slipped out of alignment, even assuming he survived the ordeal of the count without a beating from the Jem'Hadar.

If he fell, Julian would have to go to him. If he asked, Julian would have to treat him. Even if he did neither, failing to follow through and check on Nador tomorrow would be ethically and morally dubious — a grey area between the letter of Julian's personal and professional code, and outright negligence. How could anyone, even Enabran Tain, demand such a thing of him?

He knew, of course. Tain felt threatened, by Gul Nador himself and by the relationship Julian had forged with him outside of the elder Cardassian's sphere of awareness. That Tain hadn't known about it from the start was almost more of an affront than their cooperation had been. He had always demanded unwavering loyalty from those under his command: everything Julian had learned of him from Garak made that obvious. He had decided Julian was under his command, and so the same was expected of him. Tain had no benchmark for community. He was immune even to the much-vaunted Cardassian virtue of duty to the State, which might have been turned to precepts of cooperation and interdependence in a place like this. He saw only that Julian had acted under his own agency, and he had decided that must be swiftly punished.

Julian wanted to believe there was an element of envy in Tain's response, too: that he was jealous of the idea of "his" doctor tending to a rival. That, at least, would speak to a sliver of personhood, the vulnerability and need for the friendship and support of others that everyone was supposed to possess. Although he had seen no evidence of this in any of his dealings with the aged spymaster, Julian longed to believe it was there, deep under layer upon layer of cracked and calloused armour. But he couldn't count on that to mitigate the man's horrifying threat, and he certainly didn't believe it would protect him from Tain's wrath.

Heavy boots thundered by as a Jem'Hadar soldier passed, casting Julian a look of icy contempt but saying nothing. There was still more than an hour until curfew; the White ceremony had not even begun. Julian was allowed to move freely about the compound, at least as much as the force-field and the airlock allowed. Nevertheless, he drew his knees in closer to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. He was shivering, and not only with shock. It was horribly cold out here; he doubted it was much above freezing. He had less intrinsic insulation than he'd possessed during the last period of orbital night, and his body didn't have the caloric support to keep him properly warmed. He wished he'd thought to bring his blanket from the barracks, but going back for it was out of the question. He couldn't face Enabran Tain. Not now. He wasn't sure he'd be able to face him at curfew, even, and what the hell would become of him then?

Footsteps again, this time lighter but broken by the shushing shuffle of a loose sole. Julian forced himself to lift his aching eyes as a new shadow joined the ones criss-crossing his legs and feet. Kalenna stood above him, looking down with still and troubled eyes.

"Doctor," she said softly, by way of greeting. The quiet courtesy and earnest respect in her voice sent a dart of pain through Julian's chest. How he had come to treasure and rely upon that: the good will and admiration of others. Here, it was a comfort that allowed him to cling to his sanity. But back home, it was a measure of his essential humanity, something he'd fought hard to rebuild and then to cling to since it had been stripped away from him at the age of fifteen. Seventeen years of striving to be worthy of the regard of those around him, seventeen years of trying to convince himself he was worthy of life, fulfilment, and dignity… and all of it could be torn from him in one more savage stroke. Not by his parents this time, but by a bitter old Cardassian whose sense of empathy had atrophied long ago.

"Major," he croaked.

Kalenna looked around, a swift tactical sweep to confirm what Julian already knew: he was as far away from both of the nearest sets of sentries as possible. Then she unfurled the thing bundled over her crossed arms, shaking it out, and nodding to indicate Julian should lean forward. It was one of the coarse prison blankets.

"It is cold tonight," she said with a note of irony, as if they had met on one of the cobbled streets of her homeworld.

Julian forced himself to relinquish the support of the wall, letting Kalenna drape the blanket over his shoulders. Immediately and almost without pausing to think, he gathered it tightly around him, grateful for the buffer it provided from the bitter air. It was a welcome barrier between his body and the frigid wall, too, when he was able to lean back. Kalenna lowered herself beside him, folding her thin legs with noiseless, concerted grace. She rested her own shoulder-blades on the wall, too, her shoulder near enough that he could feel her warmth — lesser than his, but still measurable in this hollow cavern of spiteful cold — but not quite touching his own.

"Something has happened between you and the Cardassian," she observed without inflection, gazing off across the atrium instead of looking Julian in the eye. "I have never seen Tain in such a state. He is triumphant. Jubilant. He looks like a hill-goat that's broken into the garden at last."

It was such an evocative image that Julian almost felt the urge to laugh. Almost. He sighed instead.

"We had a… difference of opinion," he said wearily. "About my obligation to treat Gul Nador."

Kalenna nodded. "Tain does not think highly of him. I do not understand, because it was Tain who hand-picked him for our doomed expedition. But the Gul is many things the spy is not, and that unsettles Tain. He has threatened you?"

Julian's head whipped to the side, and he knew he was staring at her with enormous, anxious eyes. She glanced at him and nodded knowingly before turning her gaze again to spare him its pressure. "I have suspected for some time that Tain possessed some weapon to use against you," she said. "Some shard of information he has guarded as jealously as a gemstone. Although he is a man who protects his secrets, he has a way of being insufferably smug about them."

Julian felt himself relaxing a little, absurdly. He trusted Kalenna as he would never trust Tain. He probably would have been able to understand why his secret had to be kept, and he didn't doubt what Tain had said. The Romulans likely did have their own history of successful eugenics, and they wouldn't disdain any technology that strengthened their Empire. Yet the old habits were deeply engrained. Julian wouldn't feel safe confiding his own awful truth to another. It was too much to ask.

"He knows something about me," he said softly, unburdening himself as much as he was able. It wasn't much. "It's useless to him here, but it could destroy my life if he disseminated it to Starfleet Command upon our return. Everything I've worked for, everything that matters to me, Tain could take it all with a few well-placed questions."

They were strong words, and there was not a millimole of exaggeration in them. Just saying it aloud, however, brought some relief to the awful panic that had seized him in the barracks. Even as the silence lapsed between them, Julian found himself breathing with a little less pain, his head growing fractionally clearer, his hands relinquishing some of their frantic tremor.

Finally, Kalenna spoke.

"I am sorry, Doctor," she said softly. "Sorry that you must bear such a secret, and sorrier than I have words to express that it has fallen into the clutches of Enabran Tain. I would envy no one that position."

There was another hush. Julian could hear Eighth Talak'ran issuing curt, quiet orders to one of his subordinates, somewhere far down by the other end of the atrium. The life support system hissed, circulating its unbearably dry air. He fancied he could almost hear the groans in the heart of the asteroid, deep in the tunnels of the tapped-out ultritum mine that lay somewhere beneath them. He imagined, but knew he could not possibly hear, the whirling whoosh of the Wormhole far away, opening its eye to usher some lucky ship through to the Alpha Quadrant, where Deep Space Nine hung like a jewel in the heavens to welcome it. Home. His heart ached for home.

Tain knew that. It was what gave his threat such awful power.

"If my own secret were to fall into Tain's hands, I do not know if I could bear it," Kalenna murmured. "You are braver than I, Doctor, if you are even considering defiance."

Julian looked at her again, surprised but not startled. He remembered the feeling that she had left something unsaid on the day he had done her nutritional assessment.

"I am considering it," he said. "I must. But the cost is unimaginable."

Kalenna nodded. "Unimaginable," she agreed. She wasn't watching him. Her eyes had drifted up to the utilitarian windows set high in the dome. They were scratched and smoky with age and neglect, and Julian had never caught even a glimpse of a star through them. But as he looked, he thought he could see one now; a single pinion of light beyond the milky mottling that distorted the black vacuum beyond. It might have been his imagination, but he hoped it wasn't. A fragment of an old nursery rhyme drifted through his memory. It had the haziness of the things he remembered from Before, although he knew he'd learned the whole little poem by effortless osmosis the year he was seven.

_Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…_

"You were so kind to fear Sub-Commander Darok's remarks about my lack of family had wounded me, Doctor," said Kalenna. "When I assured you they had not, I did not say that they could not. I did not express the satisfaction and consolation I took from his assumption, because I could not admit to the reason for it."

Astonished comprehension dawned. Julian stared at her. "You  _do_  have a family," he said. "But it's not generally known."

Kalenna nodded. "It is known by no one," she said. "Not our fellow prisoners, not the Tal Shiar, not even by my cousins back home in the Empire, or my childhood friends, or my most trusted colleagues. I have a beloved, Doctor. A wife of the heart, if not under the law. And we have a son."

She spoke these words with the quiet conviction of someone who has held them in her heart through long years of silence, longing to speak them as she did now, with affection and profound pride, but never daring to do so. Julian felt the weight of her trust, but he didn't understand. Why the need to keep such a thing secret?

"I must have misunderstood what I thought I knew of your culture," he said cautiously. "I believed Romulan society was tolerant of sexual diversity and marital liberty." Hadn't she said as much herself, when speaking of what she called the  _biological imperative_  of procreation?  _Other kinds of families are accepted, but not honoured in the same way_. While that was hurtful enough, and something human culture had struggled for centuries to move past, it was a far cry from a need to keep her wife a secret.

"It is, in many ways," said Kalenna. "Private citizens who wish to live their lives outside the model of a husband and a wife who produce children of their bodies are permitted to do so. Even in the military, such unions are not impossible. But in the Tal Shiar…"

She shook her head in a gesture that was more than half a shudder. "I did not expect to fall in love," she whispered. "I had enjoyed my youthful dalliances, like so many do, but I felt no need to pledge my life to another person. Pledging it to the service of the Romulan people seemed fulfilment enough for one lifetime. I completed my years of training at the Imperial War College, and was inducted into the Tal Shiar. But I was young and pleasing to the eye, and they did not place me on a military vessel, or assign me to the surveillance of our enemies as I expected. My first placement was at Valdore University, not as an observer, but as an undercover operative."

Julian understood. "You enrolled as a student," he said.

Kalenna nodded. "And I met her. My beloved. You must believe me, Doctor, as I say again: I did not expect to fall in love."

"We can't choose who we fall in love with," said Julian softly, thinking of his own storied history of broken romances and unfulfilled dreams. "The heart wants what it wants."  _Or else it does not care_ , his mind added dreamily. He didn't want to remember the opening line of the letter few people remembered as the source of that human adage, but he did anyway. It sent a chill of desolation through him, and he hugged the blanket closer to his ribs.  _When the Best is gone — I know other things are not of consequence…_

"The heart wants what it wants," Kalenna echoed, trying the words. "That is very poignant, Doctor. And true. I wanted her, not for a night's pleasure or a season's joy, but for a lifetime. Then I learned she wanted the same."

"But the Tal Shiar would not allow you to marry a woman?" asked Julian gently. He was dismayed, but not surprised. Everything he knew about the Romulan Intelligence apparatus constructed an image of authoritarian control — over the Romulan people, over the unfortunate worlds that huddled along the Empire's borders, fearful of incursion, and over their own operatives.

"They cannot forbid it without outcry," said Kalenna. "But it is… ardently discouraged. The Tal Shiar frowns upon any familial entanglements among its operatives. It is seen as a vulnerability a true professional can ill afford. Yet the are willing to look the other way for fruitful marriages — which is to say, between a man and a woman who can and do produce offspring — because it serves the greater need of the State. Other images of marriage and family are not so tacitly tolerated."

She shivered. Julian raised an arm to offer her a corner of the blanket, but she shook her head. "The chill is in my heart, not my body," she said. Then she resumed her tale. "It would have harmed my career prospects, but what is that sacrifice when measured against love? I could have gladly endured that, but what I could not endure was to have my beloved used as a weapon against me. Jealous compatriots, vindictive superiors, the invisible machinery of the agency itself; any and all of these could twist such a marriage into a tool of punishment and control. It would endanger my beloved. It would imperil our son. It could destroy them both utterly."

Julian shuddered. He had often pondered the ramifications of marriage to a Starfleet officer — back in the idyllic days when he'd still believed Palis Delon would love him unconditionally until death did them part, in the early days on Deep Space Nine as he watched the fissures and hiccups in the O'Brien marriage as Miles and Keiko struggled to adapt, at Ensign Hoya's wedding. It was a life that brought a certain degree of nomadic uncertainty, and the constant risk of losing one's spouse in action. But the idea of Starfleet using an officer's family as a means of control or punishment was unthinkable.

"That's… I don't know what to say," he confessed. "I don't know how you can endure that."

"I could not," said Kalenna. "That is why there is no legal marriage, no public display of our love. That is why my family will not have received my death benefit when the fleet was reported destroyed, and why they do not have the small solace of my stipend in perpetuity. It is why our son was gestated from my beloved's egg and borne in her womb, not mine, and why her name appears on his birth records alone. He cannot speak of me to his classmates. He cannot so much as intimate he has two mothers. But he is  _my son_ , Doctor, even though he cannot acknowledge me and does not bear my genes."

"Of course he is," Julian affirmed, almost fiercely. "Love makes a family, not DNA." Didn't he know that better than anyone, at least from the obverse?

A faint, wistful smile touched Kalenna's lips. "You have such language to describe these things, Doctor," she said. "A way of capturing the feeling of the truth in a way our Romulan philosophy cannot. It must be a beautiful thing, to live in a society where such things can be spoken of so freely."

"It is," Julian agreed. He knew he too often took that for granted; most Federation citizens did. Freedom was such a fundamental right, and it was easy to forget that other societies could so strictly curtail it.

"I must remember these things, to share with my beloved upon my return," Kalenna mused. She sounded almost like a young girl, lost in a romantic fantasy. " _Love makes a family, not DNA. The heart wants what it wants._ I see I was right to entrust this to you."

Julian nodded gently. "I'll guard your secret with my life," he promised.

"I know," said Kalenna. "I have been certain of that for some time now, Doctor, or believe me that I would never have shared it with you. I can count on one hand the people who know of the nature of my family. Even the neighbours on my beloved's street believe me to be no more than a friend from her university days, who comes to visit for a week or two every half-year."

"When you're home on leave," Julian said, comprehending the arrangement with greater clarity now.

Kalenna nodded. "Officially, I have no fixed address on Romulus. This pleases the Tal Shiar Command greatly: they believe me to be an exemplary operative, free of personal entanglements and distractions. Believed." She grimaced thinly: now, they believed her dead. "It is not easy for my beloved. Life as an unattached parent is wearisome, and even before my capture I could not be present to bear my share of the daily labours. Now, she does not even have our letters, or the financial support I was able to provide. My comfort is that as a preeminent biochemist, my beloved far outstripped my earnings with her own — but still, my contribution allowed for luxuries that will surely be missed."

Julian wondered how she had managed to move funds without arousing the suspicions of the Tal Shiar auditors, but he didn't ask. He probably wouldn't be able to make sense of the answer. Tain was right about Federation attitudes towards money: its utter unimportance in the culture meant they had no concept of the ways it could be diverted or stolen, or the ways it should be protected.

Kalenna seemed to follow his thoughts, though, because she almost smirked. "Ah, some secrets are not to be shared even with those we would trust with our children, Doctor," she lilted playfully.

Julian tucked his head a little. If he hadn't been too exhausted to muster an erethemic response, he might have blushed. "Fair enough," he said. "You'll notice I didn't actually ask the question."

"Mm-hmm," she agreed, tilting her head back to rest on the wall and gazing up at the portholes again. "My beloved's mother knows of our entwined lives. It was she who witnessed the marriage vows that are binding in spirit, though not in law. She would never betray the secret. Not even under torture, I think. She is of the old guard: she was a ship's commander in the legions in the dark days after the great war between our peoples. She was once a Starfleet captive."

That was fascinating, at at another time Julian would have pressed for more details. But clearly Kalenna felt the need to share these truths she had never been able to confide in another. He stayed silent, listening as she went on.

"The only others who are privy to the truth are two who share our home," Kalenna said. A tiny, wistful smile touched her lips. "A widow and her daughter. My beloved took them in when she was bearing our son. I thought she was mad to do so, but her heart always outweighed her fear. Much like yours does, Doctor, time after time. The woman was once a philanthropist who worked with the institute that funds my beloved's research. She's from an old and powerful family, and her husband was a powerful commander. Are you familiar with the Norkan Campaign?"

It rang a bell, but it was hazy. The word  _massacre_  stirred deep in Julian's mind, and he hurriedly shook his head. "Medicine's always been my focus," he demurred. "I could tell you anything you'd like to know about the Romulan efforts to curtail the Tandaran plague."

Kalenna let out a puff of air, amused. "My beloved would delight to discuss it with you, I'm sure," she said. Then she picked up the thread of her tale. "He was a hero, but he was also a fool. He thought his status inoculated him against the consequences of his words: he defied the High Command on more than one occasion, and he became a liability. The Tal Shiar laid a trap for him, one of their most elaborate misinformation campaigns ever crafted for the benefit of a single individual." Her expression darkened, and her voice took on a bitter cast. "It was a hateful manoeuvre, because it relied upon his nobility and his regard for the value of sentient life. A lesser man would not have fallen into the pit. Jarok did."

Julian listened in fascination, not so much at the grim account as at the judgement Kalenna passed upon it. He had learned weeks ago that she was a woman of extraordinary compassion and morality, but this was so far removed from what he would have expected from a Tal Shiar officer that it still astonished him. He saw now the intricacy of the double life she had led — a triple life, really, with her image as an outstanding operative underlying whatever covers she had assumed over the years, and overlaid upon this foundation of goodness and nobility of spirit, and the secret life she had hidden from one of the Alpha Quadrant's elite Intelligence organizations. It was beyond impressive. It was awe-inspiring.

"He betrayed the Empire," she said tiredly. "He defected to the Federation. When he saw how he had been deceived, and that all he had loved was lost to him, he took his own life aboard one of your vessels. His family paid a dear price. Their assets were seized. His wife was denied by her relations. She and her daughter would have been flung penniless into the streets… but for my beloved. She saw what I could not: the need for mercy, where I saw only the danger to her and to our unborn child. And of course, I know she was lonely. They've lived with us ever since."

She blinked rapidly, and said with sudden vehemence; "I was a fool to question my beloved's wisdom. She was right to care for her friend, right to trust her with our very lives. And it has been a comfort to me, all these bitter months, to know that she is not alone. Someone was there to console her when news of my death reached Romulus. Someone has been there to help her as she has learned to live with her sorrow. And our child has a few people in his world, at least, who know he is bereft of a mother — when he cannot take that grief and pain beyond the walls of our home. He has one friend, at least, whom he can turn to."

Her tone shifted again, this time to a tender fondness almost more painful than her hurt. "Our little boy adores Vriana, and I have never seen a young girl so patient with a toddling shadow as she was with him. I hope she hasn't outgrown that. Almost two years since I've been gone… she'll be a young woman now. Almost fifteen? With my beloved's sponsorship, she should be able to salvage some future for herself, despite her father's disgrace. And my boy. My little baby boy…"

Her voice broke. Julian disentangled his hand from the blanket and offered it to her. She shook her head, forcing a resolute swallow and looking deliberately skyward, refusing to meet his eyes.

"He was not yet five when I last stood in the threshold of my home," she said hoarsely. "He would be seven now."

A sad little smile touched Julian's lips like an alighting butterfly. "My best friend's daughter is seven," he said. "It's a remarkable age. She's so bright and inquisitive, learning so quickly. She can outtalk me, which my friend would tell you takes some doing."

Kalenna looked at him in pleased surprise. "Is that so?" she said. With a rueful little shrug, she said; "A shame they cannot meet. I would like my son to learn more of humans than his grandmother tells."

"You can teach him," Julian said, his voice dropping to the barest of whispers. "When you get home."

"Home…" She breathed the word, and then hung her head wearily. "Will he even remember me? Two years is a long time for a child of his age. And I was never a sustained presence in the home. So often away, coming by night and leaving in secret, presented to everyone else in his world as an old friend of his mother's… who am I to him?"

"You're his mother," said Julian. "Of course he'll remember you. Your beloved will be sure he remembers you."

Kalenna closed her eyes, fighting to keep her face smooth and serene. "I hope you're right, Doctor," she whispered. "I hope you're right."

"I am," Julian promised, though he knew he had no right to do so. Still, he could not imagine the woman Kalenna spoke of with such profound, cherishing love doing anything but honouring her memory, and encouraging their son to do the same. How overjoyed they would be, when they learned the truth, and their family was whole again! His dream for his own homecoming paled in comparison to that image.

They sat in silence for a while, but the hour was getting late. Soon, they'd have to go back to the barracks and Julian would have to face Tain. He tried to gather his courage for that ordeal, while beside him Kalenna sat with her eyes closed, her breathing levelling off as she grew calm and composed once more. Off near the administration pod, the Jem'Hadar were watching as Ikat'ika pledged loyalty to the Founders on their behalf, and Deyos handed off the canisters of Ketracel White.

The guards had dispersed, all looking keen-eyed and vigilant once more, and Julian was beginning to wonder if he could take refuge in one of the other barracks — maybe Sub-Commander Darok would allow him to pass a night on the floor of his? — when a blur of urgent motion caught his eye. It was Martok, striding away from the door that led to Barracks 6 almost at a run.

"Doctor!" he bellowed, the word echoing off the dome and drawing the eyes of every Jem'Hadar soldier within sight. Julian, startled by the volume of the outburst and by the wild-eyed look of desperation in the Klingon's blazing eye, scrambled hurriedly to his feet. Beside him, Kalenna's eyes shot open and she moved to do likewise. "Doctor! You must come at once!" Martok roared.

Julian ran to him, glancing from side to side at the now very alert guards and the plasma rifles trained upon them. He restrained the urge to hush the General, and gripped his sound elbow instead. "What is it?" he said as quietly as he could, hoping it would encourage Martok to lower his own voice.

"Come, there is no time!" Martok insisted, clamping his own hand on Julian's arm and whirling him bodily around. He started back towards the barracks so quickly that the physician had to trot to keep up. "Something is wrong with Tain! He cannot breathe. He has fallen.  _There is no time_!"

( _fade to black_ )


	59. Teaser: Awkward Questions

_Note: Nurse Jabara appears in many episodes, most notably 1.05, "Babel", and 3.18, "Distant Voices". Until the arrival of Doctor Girani sometime before 7.05, "Chrysalis", Jabara appears to be Julian's most senior staff member._

**Part XI, Teaser: Awkward Questions**

Nurse Jabara Telu turned from the computer terminal, satisfied that the morning's appointment schedule was in order. Everything was in order, as a matter of fact. The Infirmary always ran smoothly, but over the last month or so things had seemed much more regimented than usual. There was no one thing she could put her finger on, but the usual easy fluidity she had grown to enjoy over the years since the end of the Occupation had been disrupted somehow. The days seemed to have more structure, and there was a sense of inflexibility about things like meal breaks and decontamination sweeps. Jabara had thought it was all in her imagination until yesterday, when she'd done her monthly review of the dispensary inventory — a Starfleet policy designed to ensure that accountability for the medication supply never fell solely on one practitioner. She had noticed that the orders for medication from Bajor, always placed on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, had been submitted at exactly 1600 hours five weeks in a row. It was a little thing, but it was symptomatic of the larger change: somehow all of them, even easygoing Doctor Bashir, had fallen into a pattern of strict repetition.

She wasn't the only one who had noticed, either. After the  _Defiant_ 's last run, the medical staff had come back complaining about days of strict scheduling, rigid routine, and an intangible feeling that the unexpected was somehow unacceptable. Like Telu, they hadn't been able to pin down a cause. It was just a general feeling everyone seemed to have nowadays. This morning, coming to the end of the fourth watch that marked the last of several consecutive nights on duty, Jabara was content that everything was as it should be. She wasn't foolish enough to believe the day would run smoothly — no medical facility could ever guarantee that, and it was arrogant even to hope — but she was confident that the scaffold of good order was securely in place.

Her sharp ears picked up the hiss of the Infirmary's main entrance, followed by the swell of noise from the Promenade. At this late hour, when even Quark's would soon be calling last orders, there was less clamour than usual. It still marked a change from the peaceful hush of a suite of rooms that had been occupied for the last several hours by two people. Ensign Garrett, one of the medical technicians, had been Telu's only company since she reported for the start of the third watch. He was a personable man of about forty, who had come to Starfleet later in life than many human officers seemed to — their youthful and personable young department head included. Jabara knew there was a story behind that, but Garrett didn't seem interested in volunteering it and she was not one to gossip behind his back.

Just now, Garrett was in the surgical suite running diagnostics on the decontamination field generators. So Telu rose and went to greet the newcomer; sometimes ambulatory patients needed immediate assistance, and it paid to be alert. It was not a patient she saw as she rounded the corner, however, but Doctor Bashir.

"Good evening, Doctor," Telu said warmly. She looked forward to this part of her day: the first moment, on whatever duty shift, that she crossed paths with her commanding officer. She loved his ready smile and his cheerful disposition, and although she had never been swayed by his romantic charms — which in the early days he'd levered indiscriminately in every direction except, conscientiously, at his own staff — she was very fond of him as a colleague and a friend.

He gave her a smile today, but it was a little less radiant than usual. She couldn't say why that was so: his lips curled just as winningly and the corners of his eyes crinkled just as deeply as ever. Perhaps it was the eyes themselves, not so much merry as calculating? Still, his voice was warm as he replied; "Good evening!"

"Has something happened?" Jabara asked. They had rolled over into the fourth watch almost fifteen minutes ago, and it wasn't like Doctor Bashir to turn up late for a shift. He only did so when he'd been up by some urgent Operations matter.

He shrugged affably, but without the chagrined little grin she would have expected. "I was in the lab," he said, contentedly unapologetic; "looking in on our young patient."

Jabara's smile changed timbre, taking on what she privately thought of as her maternal note. The young patient: the baby Changeling. It — He? She? They? — had been briefly under their care in the Infirmary a few days ago, before being moved to the science lab sot that Odo and his mentor could take over its development. As fascinating as the little creature was, Telu had been relieved when it had been determined she wouldn't have any responsibility for it. Her education and experience was geared exclusively towards sentient bipeds, or what Federation parlance called "humanoids". Before coming to Deep Space Nine, she had never treated anyone who was not Bajoran or a Cardassian war orphan, and that had been a steep enough learning curve. She had always left the care of Constable Odo in Doctor Bashir's capable hands during the years before he'd lost his ability to change shape, and even now that he was what his people called a Solid, she only provided the occasional support for the physician.

Odo was more comfortable with Bashir, and that was all right. He was a man who valued his privacy, and the Doctor was in his inner circle of trust. Telu wasn't, but she didn't mind. Although their interactions were merely courteous, not truly friendly, she had taken a secret delight in watching the Chief of Security work with the baby Changeling. He doted on it, crooning in soft, loving tones as he described the world around them. His attempts to coax the undeveloped little being to hold or alter its form were so tender and tireless. It was a side of him Nurse Jabara had never seen before, and she'd had to restrain her desire to look in on the work in the lab at every opportunity over the last few days while Odo and Doctor Mora, the closest thing Bajor had to an expert on shape-shifters, worked so diligently with the infant.

"How is he? It?" she asked, faltering over the pronoun again. She wasn't comfortable using "it" to describe any child, even an amorphous one, but that seemed to be Odo's word of choice and she wanted to respect his judgement on the matter. After all, he had lived almost all of his life as a Changeling himself, and he was the only other one on the station to offer any opinion. He was the only one among them with a right to choose the words to describe his own species.

Doctor Bashir snorted softly, looking almost smug. "Spoken language is limiting, isn't it?" he asked. "How do we find a way to describe a being who transcends a Solid's understanding?" Then he reached to pat her arm. "I think 'it' is all right for now: that's what Odo uses," he concluded with a reassuring little quirk of the head.

That made Telu feel better. She obviously wasn't the only one who had considered the issue.

"And to answer your question, it's just fine," said Doctor Bashir contentedly. "Resting peacefully, all readings normal." He fell silent for a moment as if lost in thought or reminiscence and then seemed to shake himself awake. He looked around the Infirmary. "Report?"

Jabara nodded. "It's been a quiet shift," she said. "No patients since I came in. Nurse Hortak left a summary of the second watch for you to look over when you get a chance, but there's nothing unusual there. A few bumps and bruises, the follow-up for Lieutenant Peterson's hernia repair, and Corporal Tekoa ran afoul of a malfunctioning power relay; treated successfully for minor electrical burns. She's promised to pop back in the morning so you can take a look. Y'pora called about an hour ago: Major Kira is in labour again."

"Is she?"

Doctor Bashir didn't look as eager to hear this as Telu would have expected. Obstetric cases were rare on the station, and the physician clearly found a lot of joy in the few precious pregnancies that came his way. Lieutenant Vilix'Pran had budded twice in his years on Deep Space Nine, and Telu had observed the Doctor's delight each time. He and Chief O'Brien had even taken it upon themselves to organize the baby showers for the gestating father-to-be — a Federation tradition involving gifts, bounteous finger-foods, and baby-themed games.

On the first occasion, Nurse Jabara had observed the ritual with quiet awe: in her years as an underground medic in various refugee camps across her ravaged world, she had seen too many pregnancies. Very few of them had been planned. Some had been the result of accidents, when couples with no other source of consolation or joy in their lives yielded to the need for mutual physical affection at an inopportune time and inadvertently created a new life. Some had occurred when black market contraception — often unreliable or outright fraudulent, but the only kind available to all but the few privileged collaborators — had failed. Still others, the hardest ones, had been the fruit of rape. These were heartbreaking enough when the newborn child greeted the world with Bajoran nasal ridges and a Cardassian glabellar teardrop, three sets of vertebrae and tiny transverse ribs like slender reeds beneath the wrinkled velvet of the skin. When a traumatized mother, too often a girl barely out of childhood herself, delivered a full-blooded Bajoran baby after enduring such an assault, that was somehow even harder to bear.

Even the few instances when Telu had delivered babies the parents had planned for and hoped for, she had known she was delivering them into a world of want, and what had then seemed like an inevitable lifetime of hunger, humiliation, and slavery beneath the yoke of the Occupation. She had never imagined a pregnancy could be a thing of such unadulterated joy and wonder, until she had watched Doctor Bashir and the others celebrate Vilix'pran's two years ago. Even Commander Sisko had attended, and he had proved the life of the party. Telu had never seen any man so enamoured of babies — any babies at all. Vilix'pran's little hatchlings with their green-hued scales and dainty wings and trilling little voices; the Jem'Hadar infant found in a mysterious wreck, who had not stayed an infant for long; the Bajoran babies — plump, contented, and free, as Jabara had never imagined in those dark days in the camps — whose parents made the pilgrimage to the station to seek the Emissary's blessing for their offspring. Captain Sisko cherished them all. He cuddled them, rocked them, sang to them, dandled them, doted on them. He was an exemplary father to his own son; Telu had seen as much from the moment he and Jake had arrived on the station. But if there was ever a man who should have another child, or a whole brood of children, it was the Emissary of the Prophets.

The joy Doctor Bashir took in his obstetric patients was of a different variety, but it was no less radiant. He had been invested in the O'Briens' pregnancy from the very beginning, when he'd been privately a little disappointed that he hadn't been the doctor to make the initial confirmation of conception. Keiko had been working on Bajor at the time, and she had sought her diagnosis there. Once she returned to the station, Doctor Bashir had eagerly thrown himself into her prenatal care with dietary recommendations, nutritional supplements, imaging studies, advice about exercise and sleep habits, and treatment for every minor ailment or discomfort the expectant mother encountered. Keiko had even teased him, only mostly in jest, that the Doctor was more excited about the pregnancy than Chief O'Brien himself. It wasn't a measure of the Chief's reluctance — Nurse Jabara thought that his moment of very natural sober second thought had been brief and entirely understandable even in this wondrous new world of Federation plenty — but of the physician's enthusiasm.

When the runabout accident had precipitated the emergency fetal transplant, Doctor Bashir had gone from supervising a perfectly ordinary pregnancy to navigating a revolutionary one. This had produced the endearing but somewhat intimidating effect of bringing together his delight in obstetric care with his passion for innovative research, a dizzying combination that soon came to dominate the downtime conversation in the Infirmary. When he wasn't busy with other patients or the prion project that had, to hear him tell it, produced astonishing and ground-breaking results at the turn of the year, Doctor Bashir was talking about what had now become Major Kira's pregnancy. He requested vast quantities of material from the Bajoran medical archives on every topic even remotely related to gestation and birth. He examined fetal development texts and studies from his own world. In fact, he amassed more material than anyone could read in a year, let alone during the course of a normal five-month pregnancy, and yet he seemed to get through it somehow.

And it hadn't proved to be a normal five-month pregnancy. Human fetuses were not fully matured until forty weeks — a mind-bogglingly long time that put them on a footing with some of Bajor's charismatic megafauna. Even the greenriver pachyderm, who produced huge-eared offspring weighing over two hundred kilograms at birth, only carried its young for ten months. Despite the thorough vascularization Major Kira's uterus had produced, the O'Briens' baby had not grown as a Bajoran child would have. He grew at a human rate, which meant that the Major had been pregnant for what surely had to seem like an interminable seven months. Doctor Bashir had done everything in his power to support her through this marathon, respecting her wishes to turn to natural remedies instead of manufactured medications for everything but the tesokine that allowed the tiny boy to absorb Bajoran nutrients. He had shown a tireless capacity for the many minor discomforts the Major went through, documenting each one meticulously and giving her the very best of care. And as the months wore on, he had grown more and more eager for the birth itself.

Two months ago, he had enlisted Telu's help in finding a Bajoran midwife after the first two he had approached had proved incompatible with Major Kira's daunting and admittedly abrasive personality. She had accused one of "coddling", and the other of more general fussiness, and Doctor Bashir had been at a loss. Jabara, however, had thought immediately of Y'Pora. They had worked together for eighteen grim months in the Batal Labour Camp the year Telu was twenty-one. She had not been assigned to the camp, but had been smuggled in by members of the Resistance. This was common practice in such places, where medical care was practically unknown and Bajoran doctors and nurses never lasted long in the official labour force. Telu had learned how to secret herself in the most improbable of hiding places during barracks inspections, how to avoid being scooped up for the daily roll call, and how to survive on the food her grateful patients saved for her from their meagre rations. It had been a terrifying eighteen months, but also the most important work she had done in all her years of practice.

Y'Pora had been part of the slave population, expected to dig ore just like everyone else. Her midwifery practice was a secret as jealously guarded as Telu's presence in the camp, and the other prisoners had an elaborate system of supports in place to ensure she never missed her quota and never failed to draw her ration. Watching her at work had been a revelation for Telu. Y'Pora possessed a tranquility of spirit rare even among the Vedeks. Her ability to carve out a peaceful haven amid the overcrowded chaos of the camp was remarkable. Her talent in coaching a starved, overworked, and anxious woman into the state of calm contemplation necessary for a swift and healthy birth was utterly unmatched. Nurse Jabara had seen her console patients whose oncoming birth reminded them of husbands who had been killed by the Cardassians three months before. She had seen her dab soothing oil on the whip-wheals of a pregnant woman's back with almost motherly tenderness. Once, she had watched as Y'Pora coaxed a belligerent twelve-year-old to chew the bitter makara herbs that stimulated progesterone production but did nothing to quiet the gnawing of an empty belly. If she could do that, she could do anything — even win the trust of the indomitable Major Kira.

And she had: she'd passed her initial interview with flying colours, and survived her first examination of her latest patient. By the second, she and Major Kira were fast friends. Y'Pora had worked closely with Doctor Bashir to formulate the birth plan, and the physician had been eager for the day when they could finally put it to the test. Then when the day had come, earlier this week, he hadn't shown much interest.

According to Nurse Hortak, he'd seemed almost disappointed to get the call from Kira, informing him that she was moving to the birthing suite set up in guest quarters in Section L. He had been reluctant to leave the baby Changeling, despite the fact that by then it had been successfully purged of the damaging radiation. And then he had returned after a couple of hours, irately reporting that the labour was taking longer than expected. He hadn't had a single thing to say about the rituals, or the scent of the incense, or the harmony of the musical instruments that encouraged a mother's restful readiness for birth — all things he'd been fascinated by beforehand. Instead of returning to the birthing suite, even to check on Major Kira when her contractions ceased because of the unnaturally long, six-hour labour, the Doctor had performed the three surgeries that had been scheduled for that afternoon. All of them had been planned, rather than emergent, and two of them were elective. Even Lieutenant Peterson's hernia could have waited one more day, but Bashir hadn't even suggested it.

And now, instead of hastening to don the ceremonial stole and striding off to check on the expectant parents, one of whom was his closest friend, he was leaning over the computer console and studying the appointment schedule that didn't even take effect until the top of the first watch in six hours' time. It didn't make sense.

"Doctor…" Telu ventured, surprised by how reluctant she was to ask the question. She had never been uncomfortable around her doctor, not even in the first months after the Cardassian withdrawal. In those days, he'd come on so strong in social situations that he'd put off a lot of people, but she hadn't grown to know him socially. She'd grown to know him in the Infirmary, where he was always pleasant, self-assured, attuned to the needs of his patients and his staff. He wasn't merely approachable: he was utterly open, ready at any time for a query or an update. At least he had been, until recently. And that was why she  _had_  to ask: simply because it did make her so uncomfortable to try.

"Is something wrong?" she said at last, softly.

"Hmm?" The absent little grunt presaged the actual turning of his head by two very long seconds. He looked up at her, brows arced high in mild surprise. "Wrong? No: what could possibly be wrong? You said it's been a quiet night."

"That isn't what I—" But her awkward protestation was cut off by the hiss of the door.

Telu turned, and Doctor Bashir moved to peer around the partition as two tall figures shuffled into the entryway. They were leaning on one another, entwined into one entity. A three-footed entity, Jabara observed as they passed the sensors and the door slid closed again. Today, it was the woman who was limping, her ankle tucked up behind. The man had a guarding arm around his abdomen while the other supported his partner. They were both sporting a variety of visible contusions and abrasions, and he was going to have an impressive black eye if they didn't take care of it soon. It was an assortment of injuries that looked like the result of a savage mugging or a particularly violent barroom brawl, but Jabara knew better. This had become a familiar sight in the Infirmary over the last few months, and the only appropriate response was a serene smile and a dose of smooth professionalism.

Lieutenant Commanders Dax and Worf were clearly at the end of a romantic evening.

"Lovely to see you again," Telu said pleasantly, coming forward to stand at Jadzia's other side. The taller woman looped her arm around the nurse's shoulders with a grateful little grimace, moving stiffly. Telu slid a hand gently across the small of her back to brace the far hip. "Easy, now. Let me know if I'm making anything worse."

"You're good," Jadzia squeaked through clenched teeth. She looked paler even than usual, and she was deliberately keeping her breath high in her chest. Bruised ribs? Despite the rigours of Klingon courtship, both she and Commander Worf exercised their considerable skill in combat to spare any injury to the right abdominal cavity, which housed the Dax symbiont. Jadzia had confided in Telu that it was actually a skillful challenge requiring both physical and emotional control: they could let themselves get carried away in all other respects, but that one point of focus was a constant. No lovemaking, however glorious, was worth risk to the symbiont, Jadzia maintained.

"Come right through," said Doctor Bashir, with a wry little waft of one hand towards the private treatment rooms at the back of the infirmary. When the limping trio reached the threshold of the usual bay, however, he nodded at the next one down. "Worf, we'll put you next door this time, I think. Nurse Jabara, can you get Commander Dax settled?"

"Yes, Doctor," Jabara said reflexively, frowning in puzzlement. Worf did not protest: he merely eased his parMach'kai's weight over onto the other woman's shoulders and stumped after the Doctor, disappearing into the treatment room.

Jadzia watched them go. Her colour really wasn't good at all. "He doesn't usually split us up," she murmured in dark confusion.

Telu was equally nonplussed, but it was her job to put her patients at ease. She was accustomed to conveying a sense that any situation, no matter how bizarre, was under control and in all respects very much business as usual. And on the scale of strangeness this really did not rank very highly at all, what with the inordinate number of very strange scrapes the residents of Deep Space Nine got into on a shockingly regular basis. Nurse Jabara had expected adventure when she had applied for the posting, but she had not expected it would be quite so ceaseless.

"I expect it's because you're going to need to get all the way up on the biobed this time," she said calmly, thinking of Y'Pora and trying to channel some of the midwife's unshakable serenity. "Are you able to put any weight on that foot at all?"

"I  _can_ ," said Jadzia dryly. "But it's definitely not worth it."

Jabara ducked under her long, leanly muscled arm and switched sides so that she could take the more supportive position. The next minute or so was lost manoeuvring Jadzia into the room and hoisting her up onto the biobed. She was out of uniform, and Telu was relieved she wasn't wearing one of her elaborate holosuite costumes. They'd only had to cut her out of Klingon armour once so far, but it had been a memorable undertaking.

Instead, Jadzia wore a blue shirt with long sleeves and a ribbed black collar, over strange-looking flared trousers that belled out over the tops of gleaming ankle boots. There was a three-pointed insignia over her left breast that resembled a Starfleet combadge without the bars. Instead of her usual subtle colour, the smeared gloss on her expressive lips was a translucent green. She settled back against the elevated head of the biobed with a sigh of pained relief.

Telu kept one eye on her friend as she slid the instrument tray closer and picked up the tricorder. Now that she was looking, a lot of the sickly skintone seemed to be cosmetic. "Are you wearing green-tinted rouge?" she asked.

Jadzia huffed a tiny laugh, eyes dancing. "Maybe," she said slyly.

Jabara found one of the sterile wipes in the first drawer of the cart, and opened the package. "Wipe it off for me, please?" she asked. "When I first caught sight of you, I thought you were in crisis."

"Sorry," Jadzia snickered. She took the wipe with one hand and passed it off to the other before tucking her elbow with obvious caution so that she could reach her cheek. The first pass left a trail of faint pigment on the cloth.

Telu made a pass of her neck and shoulders with the tricorder, noting a few hot spots where muscles had been stretched a little past capacity, but nothing of particular concern. She picked up the hypospray and administered a small dose of asinolyathin to take the edge off the pain while she worked. As she switched back to the diagnostic tool, she looked Jadzia over again, studying the strange clothes.

"Just what were you two up to?" she asked good-naturedly. It was somewhat too personal a question for a nurse to ask, but they were also good friends. Jadzia was a sociable and personable woman, and she had made early overtures to get to know all of her Bajoran crewmates at a time when Telu, like most militia officers, was a little leery of the Federation newcomers. Their interactions had been merely casually pleasant until the awful night when Odo had responded to an alarm in the deserted Infirmary — back in the days when they hadn't staffed it around the clock — to find a Lethean looting the dispensary, and Doctor Bashir comatose on the floor. The Doctor's condition had been desperate, and far beyond Telu's experience and skill level. But Jadzia had been calm and rational, coaching her into professional mode and supporting her with rapid research and sound guidance. She was four lifetimes removed from the host who had been a doctor at the Trill Symbiosis Commission, who even then hadn't had experience with humans, but she had called upon those memories to help save Doctor Bashir's life. After that shared trial and triumph, Jadzia and Telu had been fast friends.

"Historical reenactment program," said Jadzia, taking another swipe at her face and then studying the result draped over her palm. She chuckled, then grimaced and put her hand to her ribs — high up and on the left, just as Jabara had expected. With conspiratorial irony, Jadzia added; "We went a little off-script."

"A little?" asked Nurse Jabara. She was down at the diaphragm now, and she started verifying the borders of the right abdominal cavity. All was well in that quadrant, which when you thought about it, put an interesting spin on the idea of  _safer sex_.

Jadzia pursed lips now restored to their natural colour. "Maybe a  _lot_  off-script," she said with a tiny one-shouldered shrug that clearly aggravated the strained muscles in her neck. "Oof, I really need to just lie still, I think."

"Sounds good to me," Jabara said. She skimmed over the thighs, the tricorder reading a few bruises that were probably going to prove quite colourful, checked the integrity of Jadzia's knees (no appreciable damage there), and finally settled on the ankle. "Well, it's not broken," she said sunnily.

"Huh." Jadzia opened the eyes she had closed against the discomfort, but she didn't look at Telu. She stared up at the ceiling, a faint frown creasing her brow. "He's been avoiding me, you know."

Telu was examining the boot, trying to determine if she could get it off without cutting it. It was a high-quality piece of footwear, not obviously replicated. It was apparent that Jadzia had put a lot of care into her costume, whatever this historical program was. Telu tried to remember what Commander Worf had been wearing, but she hadn't really noticed. She'd taken a glance, seen his Klingon sash… but had it been gold instead of silver?

"Commander Worf?" she asked absently, focusing more on the puzzle in front of her than the words of her patient.

Jadzia raised her head off the cushion and looked down towards her feet to fix firm eyes on Jabara. " _Julian_ ," she said.

Now it was Telu's turn to frown. "Doctor Bashir? Why would he be avoiding you?"

"I don't know," said Jadzia softly, lying back again and shifting her shoulders in search of a more comfortable position. "But he is. He hasn't popped into Ops for ages — not on my shift, anyway. He's blown me off for two dinners and a lunch invitation in the last month. Odo's been working in the science lab with the little Changeling, and I  _know_  Julian looks in on them whenever he gets the chance, but it's never when I'm down there. And now he's got Worf in another room so that he doesn't have to treat me?"

There was genuine hurt in her voice, and Telu felt her healer's instinct to salve it. "I'm sure it's not that," she said gently. "Doctor Bashir knows I'm not as comfortable with Klingon physiology, that's all. I'll go and change places right now, if you'd rather he be the one to—"

"No. No," Jadzia sighed wearily. Her eyes drifted closed again and she rocked her head in a slow shaking motion. "I'm perfectly happy to be in your care: you know I trust you implicitly. I just wish I knew why Julian's keeping his distance."

"He's been so busy," Jabara soothed. "First the Captain's neurosurgery, and then the scare with Major Kira, and his surgical schedule's been so full lately. Now with the babies—"

"Babies?" Jadzia's interest was piqued, and she looked at Telu again, more animated. "Plural?"

"Well, the baby Changeling and the baby O'Brien," said Jabara sheepishly.

"Of  _course_!" Jadzia breathed. "I haven't checked in on Kira for a couple of days — do you know if she's all right? It's not much fun when you overrun your due date. Emony's daughter Triya was two weeks late, and I don't think I've ever been so bored and miserable. The swollen ankles alone… speaking of swollen ankles, you can cut that boot off if you need to."

"I don't think I do, actually," Telu said. "If you can point your toes just a little, I'm pretty sure we can slide it off on three." Jadzia complied and Jabara took a secure but gentle grip. "One, two,  _three_."

She moved in one smooth, fluid arc, while Jadzia kept her leg perfectly still. She hissed in discomfort, but did not try to jerk away, and the boot came free. Telu set it aside, relieved. She had lived on the station for five years now, wanting for nothing, but deep inside she would always be the child who had never had enough to eat. She hadn't worn her own first pair of shoes until she was six years old. The idea of destroying a perfectly good boot made her uneasy.

"There!" she said with satisfaction. "Well done, Commander." She peeled off the sock with ease, exposing a bloating, discoloured joint above a slender foot speckled down the lateral aspect with the trailing terminus of Jadzia's spots. "It's a nasty sprain, but we'll soon put it right."

"The railing gave out," said Jadzia. "Whose bright idea was it to make the railings on a starship bridge out of  _aluminum_? I know that in those days Starfleet had to conserve its resources, but really! How did they ever brace for impact?"

Telu didn't press her for more details. She wasn't sure how much she wanted to know about this program that had gone "off-script". She reached for the connective tissue regenerator and set to work on the ankle.

"You could always get the computer to substitute a more durable material," she suggested. "Next time."

"Ah, but where's the fun in that?" asked Jadzia. "Authentic to the last detail! Or it's supposed to be. If the players are able to stay focused."

She winked impishly, and Jabara couldn't help but smile. Jadzia was one of the most unabashedly charming people she had ever met, which was one of the things that made her attraction to the stern, stentorian Strategic Operations Officer so unexpected. Although she was concerned that Jadzia had taken Doctor Bashir's decision as a personal slight, Telu wasn't sorry to be spared from treating Commander Worf. He made her nervous in a deeply engrained way she couldn't quite bring herself to examine too deeply. She knew it was tangled up in memories of her girlhood and things she had tried very hard to forget — other scowling soldiers with darker intentions than the prickly but noble Klingon. She let herself skirt the thought and refocus on her work. Hadn't Counsellor Telnorri told her time and again that it was all right to be gentle with yourself? Not every foe had to be faced when it reared its ugly head. Sometimes it was all right to walk swiftly by, and to fight another day.

Four years of therapy had helped Telu learn how to cope. A lifetime might not be long enough to undo all the damage the Occupation had wrought. That, too, was all right, according to Telnorri. Healing was a journey, not a docking bay.

"Have you noticed anything unusual? Does he seem upset?" Jadzia asked.

Jabara realized her mind had been wandering just in time to keep from asking, "Counsellor Telnorri?" She sifted through the crystalline sands of her short-term memory. "You mean Doctor Bashir?" she asked. When Jadzia nodded tightly, she shook her own head. "Not upset, no. He has been a little distractible lately. Maybe a little quieter."

"That's not like Julian," said Jadzia unhappily. "Quiet. Distractible. Isolating himself. And he's been cancelling holosuite reservations, according to Quark; avoiding an activity he usually loves. Do you think he might be…" She stopped, probably considering that this wasn't something Telu was free to offer an opinion on; it toed too near the line of medical confidentiality. Jadzia rephrased. "I'm worried he might be depressed."

Nurse Jabara had not considered this possibility, but it struck a chord. Loss of interest in things a person was passionate about… Jadzia had been talking about the holosuite, but Telu could only think of Major Kira's pregnancy. In the dark morass of depression, it was hard to take joy in the dawning of a new life. She knew that too well herself.

"I don't… I'm not sure," she said softly.

"It's just… I think the first time I noticed was on the trip back from Risa," said Jadzia. "He wasn't unhappy, exactly, but he did seem a little subdued. I thought it was just the post-holiday slump. It's always a little anticlimactic to go home again. And I know he and Leeta parted ways peacefully; that seems to be the point of the Rite of Separation. Even so, it's hard to end a relationship, and they'd been together nearly a year."

It had been a little more than a year, actually, but that wasn't important. Telu nodded. "He did seem a little down the first few days," she said. "I hoped he might meet someone at his conference last month — I know that wouldn't have been anything lasting, but it wouldn't have hurt him to have a little fun."

"A palate cleanser," Jadzia agreed. "But if he did meet someone, he hasn't said anything to me."

"Nor me," said Jabara. She switched instruments and started repairing the microscopic tears in the muscles.

"You know," Jadzia reflected quietly, in an off-kilter, dreamlike way that was probably the medication talking; "when I first met Julian, I thought he was one of the loneliest people I've ever known."

"Lonely?" Telu was surprised by this. She remembered Doctor Bashir as he'd been when he first arrived on the station: excitable, talkative, always eager to leap into a conversation with some ready opinion. He had been a force of nature, wearing down the resistance of all those around him with his exuberance and unshakable good cheer. "Doctor Bashir?"

"Yes…" sighed Jadzia. "There was just something so urgent about the way he reached out. He needed to be liked so desperately. And he didn't always make that easy," she added with a wry little chuckle. "But he's got such a good heart, and he's such a dear friend. I hope… I hope I haven't hurt him too badly."

She shuddered, and Jabara stayed silent. Her years as a caregiver had given her a strong sense of when a person wanted a response, and when they simply needed to be heard. This was one of the latter situations.

"It's hard to watch other people in love, when you're on your own," said Jadzia. "Worf and I… it's not even as if we can be subtle about it, not where Julian's concerned. He can't just pretend. I think… I think that may be why he doesn't want to treat me tonight, Telu. Everyone has a limit to their tolerance, and this might be his."

Telu didn't know what to say to this, but she was spared from the decision. The door chime chirped.

"Enter," Jadzia said, before her nurse could even consult her. She turned to the entryway eagerly, probably hoping it was Doctor Bashir after all, checking in after having made his other patient comfortable.

But when the door slid open, it was Ensign Garrett instead. He sought out Jabara's face immediately. "The surgical suite's all in order, Nurse," he said crisply. "If there's nothing else that's needed, I think I'll head off."

"I didn't realize you were still here," said Telu frankly. "Your watch has been over for almost forty minutes, Ensign. Go on: you're relieved."

"Thank you, Nurse." Garrett nodded neatly. He was always a consummate Starfleet professional. He inclined his head to Jadzia. "Commander Dax. I hope it's nothing serious?"

"Just a few bruises, Daniel, thanks for asking," she said. "Have a good night."

"Yes, sir!" he said, as if this were a direct order. Then he took in her attire and smiled. "Twenty-two fifties?" he asked with eager recogniton.

The question made no sense to Jabara, but Jadzia seemed to understand. "Sixty-eight," she said with a smile.

Ensign Garrett nodded appreciatively and left the room. Telu was busy with Jadzia's ribs now. None of them were cracked, but there was extensive intercostal bruising. She could treat it through the fabric of the bright blue shirt. It might not be necessary for Jadzia to disrobe any further.

Her patient seemed to have spent her talkative mood, and Telu worked in silence for a while. She was just addressing the scratches on the back of the neck, Jadzia curled obligingly on her side, when the door opened again, this time without a chime. Commander Worf came in and went at once to his parMach'kai's side.

"How is your foot?" he asked without preamble, letting Jadzia take his hand as he gazed down at her.

"Good as new," she said.

He nodded solemnly. "Next time, we will specify sturdier materials," he decided. It was exactly what Telu herself had suggested, but this time, Jadzia didn't dismiss the idea.

" _Next time_ ," she said instead, with a twinkle in her eyes; "either we're sticking to the program as written, or I'm playing Mara instead. I like suspension of disbelief as much as the next person, Worf, but this really pushed the limits."

He frowned at her, unsure how to respond. But then she laughed, and his carven features softened in a sudden smile that showed his crooked, pointed teeth. "Perhaps so," he said, in his deep and rumbling voice.

"All done," said Telu, feeling it was just in time. She preferred to give them their privacy. "I'd like you to rest for a few minutes. I'll check back in on you shortly."

Jadzia nodded her assent, but all of her attention was focused on Worf. In moments like this, it was obvious how very deeply in love she was. Nurse Jabara found herself smiling as she left the room, headed for the computer console in the front of the Infirmary. Doctor Bashir was already at his own desk, updating Commander Worf's records.

"I've repaired Commander Dax's ankle," Telu said as she slid into the chair at the other terminal. "Her other injuries were minor."

"Splendid," Doctor Bashir said absently, still leaning in to stare at his screen. "Commander Worf's just fine as well. I don't understand the need for all the violence, but it seems to please them both."

Telu ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip. "Doctor…" she began uncomfortably. It was the second time tonight she'd struggled to speak to him, and she couldn't help feeling the strangeness of that. "Commander Dax was concerned you might be avoiding her."

"Avoiding her?" He laughed lightly, finally finding her eyes. "That's silly… why would I be avoiding her?"

Telu felt sudden relief. "That's what I said," she sighed. "It's just that she—"

"Odo to Doctor Bashir!" The urgency of the voice that tore through the comm system made Jabara jump.

"Bashir here!" said the Doctor, instantly snapping to the alert. "What is it, Odo?"

"The Changeling, Doctor," said Odo. He sounded on the brink of panic, and Telu felt her stomach clench. She had never heard such desperation in the unflappable Security Chief's voice before. "There's something wrong — Doctor Mora and I are bringing it to the Infirmary. Can you meet us there?"

"I'm already in the Infirmary, Odo." Bashir was climbing to his feet, eyes wild with an anxiety that did not quite overpower the brisk efficiency of his movements. "Try not to worry, but be quick. I'll be waiting. Bashir out." He whipped his head around to stare at Jabara. "Nurse, I'll need you to finish up with our other patients. Computer! Send diagnostic readings from Science Lab 1 to my terminal."

Nurse Jabara didn't even have time to acknowledge her orders before the Doctor was bent over his screen again, ignoring the chair as he studied the incoming data, his agitation growing. She moved off swiftly to do as she had been told. Her professional instincts were aroused. She knew little about Changeling physiology and would not have been able to make sense of the scans, but she knew this much: something was terribly wrong.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	60. Primitive Means

_Note: I rarely write to music, but this chapter was composed to the infinite replay of Vladimir Ashkenazy's performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, more famously known as "Moonlight". Credit where credit is due._

**Part XI, Act I: Primitive Means**

Martok steered Julian into the corridor, slamming his palm into the control panel for the barracks door with no consideration for his bandaged fingers. Only when the mechanism shrieked open did he release his hold on Julian and allow him to spring across the threshold first.

Parvok was on his knees, was bowed over Tain. The Cardassian lay sprawled on the floor between his bunk and the low table, legs askew and right arm thrust up, wedged awkwardly between the pivot-point of his shoulder and the edge of the bench. His left hand was clawing at his chest. It was clear that he had taken a hard and sudden fall.

Julian stripped the blanket from his shoulders as he went, flinging it aside with no care for where it landed. Parvok hastily bounced back onto his heels and hastened out of the way. Julian dropped to one knee in his place, sliding into the narrow strip of floor between Tain's hip and the table. The steely eyes were milky and wandering, and under the layer of loose flesh all the muscles of the man's face were taut and contorted with the effort to draw breath. Tain's respirations were shallow, urgent, and obviously inadequate: disordered gasps and wheezes that made his barrel chest leap and twitch but brought no relief.

"What happened?" Julian said sharply, to no one in particular. He scooted closer, obliged to lean far over his patient in order to landmark for a pulse. "Tain? Can you hear me? Tain!"

The lolling eyes, bulging with strain, fixed almost drunkenly on Julian's face. Tain's lips moved with a shadow of purpose, but nothing emerged but another whistling tendril of useless air. Their borders, a subtly darker grey than the surrounding skin of the face, were already taking on an alarmingly purple hue.

"He fell," Parvok said hastily, his tongue almost tripping over the words. Julian had found the templar artery, and he forced himself to focus on the count, shutting out the part of his mind that was weighing the probability of every possible crisis — myocardial infarction, stroke, pulmonary embolism, rupture of an undiagnosed aneurism. "He was… he was… and then he…"

"He was gloating," said Martok grimly. "About what, I do not know. He would not say. But it was clear he was euphoric. Then he faltered, fought for breath, crashed to the floor."

His pulse was too rapid, and it was wandering wildly. Julian's hands moved almost of their own accord: flinging aside the lapels of Tain's coat, and tugging open the reluctant fastenings that closed the front of his tunic. "Tain, where is the pain?" he asked briskly. "Show me, if you can't tell me. If you can understand what I'm asking, show me where it hurts."

He waited for the clutching left hand, its plump fingers curled into talons, to give some answer. Instead, with what was obviously a mammoth effort of self-control in defiance of a body that simply wanted to flop and spasm with the effort of drawing breath, Tain shook his head twice, broadly.

"Don't be stubborn!" Julian snapped. "I'm trying to help you, and this isn't the time to — oh!"

Comprehension struck, and his eyes grew wide. Now he understood the glazed absence in the Cardassian's eyes, and why all his disordered attempts at motion were focused solely on the goal of breathing. He was strangled, suffocating, but he was not in pain. The implant in his postcentral gyrus, designed to stimulate endorphin production in the event of torture, had obviously been activated in response to whatever agony now tore through Enabran Tain's body. He could feel none of it, and that was an incredible mercy, even if it cut off a vital avenue of diagnostic information. As Julian bared the front of Tain's greasy and discoloured shirt, he could hear Garak's voice, ragged with pain and dripping with the scorn that was better armour for him than any devised by the Central Command.  _The whole purpose of the implant was to make me_ immune _to pain_!

"You're not  _in_  pain," he murmured to his present patient, now riding a wave of endogenous analgesics of limitless supply and incomprehensible potency. "That's just as well. Try to stay calm. I'm going to listen to your chest…"

It was an awkward manoeuvre, made more awkward by Tain's attempt to swat him away. The flailing hand smacked the side of his head ineffectually, and Julian caught it before Tain could try again. He fixed stern eyes on his patient's face.

"If you want to refuse treatment, I'll stop," he said grimly. "If that's what you're asking, nod once. But you ought to know that you'll probably die if you do. I don't know what I can do for you, and I won't know until I figure out what's wrong. But at least I'm in a position to try."

For a moment, Julian could not breathe either. He heard only the deafening silence of the others behind him, and the laboured, crackling hiss in the back of Tain's throat as he waited for a response. Then Tain's head twitched, almost rocking into a nod before lolling to first one side, then the other. A shake of the head.

"No?" said Julian, needing to be certain. His patient was conscious; lucid. He was capable of giving or withholding consent. "No, you don't want me to touch you? Or no, you're not refusing treatment?"

Tain's wrist twisted loose of Julian's hand, spastic fingers crawling against the Cardassian's throat before pivoting to point shakily at Julian.

"I should treat you," Julian interpreted, rocking his head in final verification. He watched for an affirmative response, anything at all. At the very least, he needed to reassure himself there was no evidence of negation.

Tain's lips worked. It was obvious that speech was a costly endeavour, and yet he croaked; "Damned… damned Fed…"

"Yes, yes," Julian said dryly. "Damned Federation ideology. Imagine caring so much for a patient's autonomy that you ask permission before manhandling him. All right. Let me listen."

He leaned down, bracing himself against the floor with one palm between Tain's left arm and his ribs, and the other clutching the edge of the table near where the spymaster's elbow was still wedged. The innermost shirt fastened up the back, and he couldn't get it off without wasting precious time. He pressed his ear into it instead, smelling the pungent low-tide stench of Cardassian body odour and praying he would be able to pick out something useful even through the cloth. Julian took two deep breaths of his own, holding in the last one. The creak and whistle of labouring lungs was momentarily deafening: like the subspace interference that obscured a message sent through an ion storm. But just as Jadzia Dax could filter out such white noise with a few taps of her instrument panel, Julian found his brain was able to tune away the distraction as he listened for Tain's heart.

And the problem was most assuredly in the heart. He couldn't hear any significant rales, or the gurgle of excessive fluid. There was some: there was always some in Tain's lungs. But it was the chaotic, tumbling thunder beneath that drew Julian's attention. There was no order to the sound, no reassuring  _lub-dub_ , not even the pathological but orderly lag of the QT prolongation he had heard before. The noises followed no identifiable repetition, thumping and echoing and popping, and beneath the lawless percussion of the mighty muscles firing with no concerted guidance, Julian could hear the blood. The swishing susurration of mitral valve regurgitation, and the low  _click_  when one chamber or another contracted without sufficient blood to fill it. Sometimes there was too little, sometimes too much, and without an orderly rhythm, precious little of it was getting to where it was needed. The most pressing deficit was to Tain's lungs: that was why he couldn't breathe. But his brain was already starving for want of oxygen, his lips were cyanotic, his extremities were probably numb.

He pushed himself up off of Tain's chest, and gently guided his trapped right arm away from the bench and down to his side. At least he could get his patient into a more comfortable position. Having a limb elevated like that might improve venous return, but with the heart unable to cope with the blood it was already getting, that was pointless and counterproductive. Better to tuck the arm close, where it wouldn't put any more strain on the circulatory system trying fruitlessly to feed it — and every other reservoir in the Cardassian's body — without a functioning pump to do so.

At least he had his diagnosis. Supraventricular tachychardia. He couldn't be any more specific than that without a a tricorder, or at least a stethoscope. Julian felt a wild, careening ascent of panic that began at the root of his torso and tore up through his thorax and into his throat. He had to bit down the urge to throw back his head and wail aloud the horrified words that filled his frantic mind.

_What the hell am I supposed to do?_

He couldn't shock Tain back into sinus rhythm without the proper tools. He couldn't startle his heart back into obedience with a well-placed smack, as much as he might have enjoyed trying under other circumstances. Chest compressions wouldn't accomplish anything until the man's heart actually stopped, and by then it would be too late. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation wasn't a cure, but a stopgap: a way to buy a few minutes' grace while someone else ran for an optronic defibrillator. The likelihood of actually restoring a heart to normal activity with external massage was miniscule. On the two occasions Julian had started CPR without hope of defibrillation, it had been utterly pointless.

The memories, glazed with the surreal quality of a nightmare, flashed through his mind as he felt again for Tain's peripatetic pulse. Epran, suddenly lifeless after shaking with a seizure of anguish in the final throes of the Blight. Julian had doubled back to him after a frantic circuit of the makeshift hospital, switching off the instruments that were causing the Dominion's diabolical virus to mutate at a thousand times the normal rate. He had tried, knowing it was useless. He might have gone on thumping the dead man's chest for hours if Jadzia hadn't startled him out of it, understanding at once what he could not: that all was lost.

Flickering orange flames that did nothing to dispel the unnatural chill of the night — an ominous symptom of an ailing ecosystem strangled by the pollutants of its dominant species — obscured Julian's sight as he scrambled across filthy pavement on his knees. He landmarked through layers of shabby garments no more filthy than the ones on his own back. Elbows locked, shoulders straight above the patient's sternum. Just like he had practiced in the holodecks at Starfleet Medical. Sharp, rapid compressions, deep but not too deep; Julian's instructors had told everyone but the Vulcans to use their full strength, and they had never known he held himself back. Chaos all around him: panic and rage, cries of dismay, archaic expletives shouted into the night. The  _whip-whip_ of helicopter blades in the sky above. Commander Sisko's desperate entreaty:  _Help him! He never would have gotten hurt if it wasn't for us!_  Julian desperately begging the twenty-first century man, who had leapt into the fray to save a stranger — to save Julian — from a savage beating, to breathe.  _Breathe, damn you, breathe!_ Two more compressions that did nothing but pump more blood from the yawning abdominal wound.  _God, he's gone!_

That time, too, Julian had to be dragged away from the body. Not by Jadzia's sharp words, but by his commanding officer who had seen what Julian hadn't paused to: that either they had to flee before the Sanctuary District guards arrived at the scene, or they would face arrest for the man's murder and further damage to the timeline. Not until they had taken shelter in a cellar well that stank strongly of refuse and urine had Julian learned what Sisko had seen as soon as he snatched up the man's ration card: the timeline had shattered at the moment B.C.'S knife found its mark. The man Julian had failed to save, after being the inadvertent cause of his wounding in the first place, had been none other than Gabriel Bell himself.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was useless unless you had the means to kickstart a heart's electrical impulses again. If it came to that, Tain was lost — like Epran, like Bell. There had to be some other way. Julian had to keep that soulless heart beating. Had to remind it  _how_  to beat, even though he had no ready means of doing so.

His mind was racing through treatment options as he reached around the broad, rigid neck to fumble with the fastenings of the man's collar. Julian pulled it open as widely as he was able, trying to remove any stricture on his patient's airway. He spread his left palm over the ridged brow, tilting Tain's heavy head back to preserve the same. A litany of procedures, of instruments, of drugs, danced through his floundering thoughts. All of them unobtainable. All of them impossibly miraculous remnants of a half-forgotten lifetime when he'd actually been allowed to practice  _medicine_ , not whatever Dark Ages substitute he'd been forced to muddle through these last hellish weeks!

Tain's whole ribcage jerked with a sudden spasm, and for an instant Julian was certain it was the final throe of death. His own lips parted in the preamble of a cry of frustration, horror and despair, but then Tain's rippled with the force of a brief, sharp burst of air. His milky eyes rolled with the effort. He was trying to cough.

He always coughed to alleviate the lesser arrhythmias, just as he always kneaded his sternum when the angina grew too painful. It was a crude substitute for a pacemaker, and not a very efficient one. It would do nothing in this situation, when his atria were locked in spasms of quivering chaos— but that didn't mean other manual techniques were useless.

"Valsalva manoeuvre," Julian gasped. Somewhere above and behind, someone asked what he was talking about. He heard them only on the fringes of his consciousness. His own heart was hammering with fresh purpose, and he tried to nudge up closer to Tain's head. There wasn't enough clearance between the bulky body and the bench for Julian to shuffle on his knees, so he did the only thing he could think of: he swung his right leg up and over Tain's hip, straddling his stomach as he insinuated his own face right into the Cardassian's line of sight. "Valsalva manoeuvre!" he repeated, as if shouting out an answer in an emergency simulation back at the Medical Academy.

" _Tain_!" he said sharply, forcing the wandering eyes to pivot to his face. Once there, he held them with sheer force of will. "Tain, can you pinch your nose?"

The Cardassian's left hand fluttered, rising a few centimetres off his belly before falling back again. His face creased with something so like apologetic despair that Julian's more urgent emotions were blotted out by a moment of aching compassion. He didn't see the master of the Obsidian Order, the man who had destroyed Garak's life and had not two hours ago threatened to destroy Julian's own. He didn't see the spy, the assassin, the wielder of terror and torture and death. He saw an old man, weighed down by his failing body, terrified and suffocating and yearning to live.

"All right," Julian breathed, with a tenderness he never could have imagined feeling for Enabran Tain. His hand moved of its own accord to stroke the side of his patient's face, from stippled temple to ribbed jaw. The grey skin was slick with the sweat of anguish, clammy and impossibly cold.  _Absence of hypothalamic thermoregulation_ … "It's all right."

Then his voice took on brisk, purposeful tones. "I need you to take a breath. I know it's not easy, but you've got to try. As soon as it's in, I'm going to cover your mouth and close your nose, and you need to try to breathe out. Do you understand? Breathe out against my hands, as hard as you can. If we're lucky, it'll force your heart back into a real rhythm. That's all you need to do, Tain: breathe in, deep as you can, then try to force it out again. Can you do it? Can you try?"

The wide, staring eyes looked lost in blind bewilderment, but a croak of hoarse torment broke from taut lips. It was almost too faint even for Julian's sensitive ears, but he heard it for what it was: a strained attempt at affirmation.

"Good!" he said, almost a laugh of nervous relief. "Whenever you're ready. As deep a breath as you can take."

And Tain took a breath. His chest heaved and his mouth fell wide, his whole body bucking with the effort. The gasping intake of air was deafening to Julian, and he wondered how it sounded to the desperate onlookers. He didn't have time to steal a glance behind him. As soon as the air clicked in Tain's throat, signalling that his labouring lungs had taken all they could, Julian's deft hands did their work. His left thumb snagged Tain's chin, closing his jaw with a quick little  _click_ as his palm made a seal over the Cardassian's cyanotic lips. The three supportive fingers of his right hand spidered out around his far eye, bracing against the floor of the socket, the apex of the supraorbital ridge, and the edge of the glabellar teardrop on Tain's brow. Finger and thumb each found a nostril and clamped tight against the septum.

"Breathe out!" Julian coached. "Hard as you can. Breathe out against my hands."

Tain obeyed. His chest jerked and twitched, and his broad cheeks swelled like twin bladders against the weight of Julian's palm. There was a tickle of air against the webbing between his third and fourth fingers, and Julian adjusted his hold to seal the leak. In a crystalline instant of possibility, when the manoeuvre teetered on the brink of every potential outcome — improbable but longed-for success, simple failure and a return to the bleak baseline of a moment before, a catastrophic stroke or final infarction of the heart with its payload of instant death — a cool and distant part of Julian's brain appreciated the irony. He could feel the weight of Tain's hand on his own face, sealing mouth and nose in one efficient movement, smothering him and putting just enough anguished pressure on a fractured zygoma to compel his victim to reconsider his reticence.

It had been a means of interrogation; improvised torture. Now, Julian was doing the same thing to Tain in an attempt to save his life. Irony: there was no other word.  _At least_ your _cheekbone isn't broken_ , he thought at his patient, wryly.

The pressure against his palm abated, and Tain's ribs hitched with the desperate need to exhale. Julian pulled back his hands and let him do so, expecting another thready series of sputtering puffs. Instead, Tain emptied his lungs in one long, blustering stream strong enough to ruffle the oily tangle of curls across Julian's brow. He sucked in another breath, far deeper than the one he'd taken to initiate the Valsalva. Then his whole heavy body sagged against the floor, every muscle's resistance spent. Shallow, hungry pants replaced the deeper respirations, and Tain's eyes closed in exhaustion and the sudden release from anguish.

Julian's right hand, hovering in mid-withdrawal over Tain's nose, flew immediately to his temple, feeling for his pulse. It was still weak and far too quick, but it was no longer wandering. He braced himself with his left hand and dropped his ear to Tain's chest, listening through the muffling layer of cloth. If he held his own breath, he could just make out the  _lub-dub_  of a normal cardiac rhythm. Overwhelmed with relief, Julian moved to sit back on his ankles, remember just in time that he was straddling his patient. He changed the direction of his motion and straightened his thighs instead, reaching one long arm across the cot to snag hold of Tain's thin pillow.

"Well done," he lauded quietly, lifting Tain's huge, heavy head and sliding the cushion beneath it. He eased the man's skull down onto the meagre padding and tried to brush the trails of pungent perspiration away from Tain's eyes. "You did it. You're back in sinus rhythm. You can rest now. You can breathe."

They were the murmured words of reassurance and comfort he would have given any patient, but there was a sincerity to them Julian had never expected to feel for this one. He had thought Tain had worn away the last of his compassion towards him weeks ago, but it seemed his heart still remembered how to feel empathy even for those who eschewed it themselves. This had been a terrifying, anguished, frantic situation for Tain, and he had done what needed to be done.

"The pain will fade in a few minutes," Julian went on, almost crooning. He raked a stray tentacle of greying hair away from Tain's jaw, and pressed his palm across the man's brow, gently reassuring. "You did it. You've won this round. You can rest."

"How can I  _rest_  with you clucking like a broody taspar right over my head?" Tain asked sourly, neither bestirring himself nor opening his eyes. He simply rocked his head to the left, away from Julian. "And I don't know what your intentions are towards me, Doctor, but I'll thank you to get your bony carcass off my hips."

Julian's lips twisted in a sudden, peculiar manoeuvre that it took him a moment to recognize as a grin of sarcastic amusement. From the moment Tain had said the words  _the unnatural creature you are_ , he'd earnestly believed he would never smile again — and that seemed like a lifetime ago. Now, as he shuffled down the length of Tain's legs until he was clear of the table, so that he could ease himself over to one side, he couldn't help it.

"Whatever you say," he said dryly. "You've earned a request or two." He looked up at the three watchful faces, Martok's slack with spent battle-readiness, and the two Romulans' masks of relief, and held his hand out to Parvok. "My blanket?" he asked. Tain's was tangled and twisted beneath him. He had probably had it bundled around his shoulders when he fell. Julian knelt forward far enough to spread his own over the Cardassain's limp body.

Tain snorted. "If I had known this was all it took to get you to obey me without question, Doctor, I would have stopped my heart ten days ago."

Julian heard the abrupt little laugh that followed this pronouncement, and for a dismayed moment thought it had come from his own lips — a clearly unprofessional response to such a bleak joke. Then he realized it was Kalenna who had chuckled. He glanced back at her, reassurance in his eyes, then turned his attention back to Tain.

"Don't try it again," he instructed equably. "I won't fall for it a second time."

The sawing stutter of creaking breath that broke from Tain's lips had to have been an exhausted chortle.

 _(fade_ )

Julian let Tain lie where he was for half an hour, by which time curfew had been called and the barracks door sealed. He was reluctant to move him immediately, even though he knew he could not let his patient spend the whole night on the hard, frigid floor. There was nothing he could do for him but monitor his vitals and pray the primitive reset of his sinoatrial node would hold.

As horrifying as the ordeal had been, Julian had to admit to himself that Tain was lucky. He could not say for certain that no infarction of the cardiac muscle had accompanied the excruciating arrhythmia: without the capacity to run an imaging scan of the heart, or an analysis of the patient's blood, he was working blind. But if there had been any ischemia of the cardiac muscle, it was either minor, or it had resolved swiftly with the restoration of normal cardiac rhythm. In other words, if Tain had suffered a heart attack, it had been a small one.

The inability to be certain of what was going on inside his patient's body, particularly at a cellular level, was maddening. As he did what he could to make Tain comfortable, silently counting his respirations and returning again and again to his temple for a pulse, Julian had to fight back wave after wave of swelling frustration. He couldn't be certain of the extent of the damage. He couldn't say with any specificity what had caused the arrhythmia. He couldn't do anything to keep it from happening again. He didn't waste time yearning for his clean and well-stocked Infirmary, but he couldn't keep back the chorus of lesser  _if onlies_. If only he had a medkit. If only he had a tricorder. If only he had a vial of metrazene. If only he had one damned tablet of acetylsalicylic acid…

That thought brought him up short, and a bitter little sneer of despair touched Julian's lips. He'd be wishing for a fleam and a jar of leeches next.

Finally, he looked around the barracks at the others. Parvok was sitting on his cot, pressed as far into the corner as he could get. Kalenna stood with her back to the door, watching silently as she had since following Martok through the door at a run. Her expression was grave but no longer frantic, though her colour was terribly ashen. The Breen had cleared the area before Julian returned, and they stood near the back wall, a silent and unreadable sentinel.

It was Martok who startled Julian. The Klingon was sitting squarely in the middle of his own cot — which was unusual enough, but he had not bothered to fling aside the thin pallet as he did each night before he stretched out to sleep. His shoulders were slumped, forearms resting on broadly spread knees and hands dangling between. The expression of dumb desolation on his craggy face made Julian's stomach wrench. The warrior, such a stalwart tower of strength in the face of the brutality of the Jem'Hadar and the grinding misery of their days, now wore a look of shattered despair.

"General?" Julian said, the word startled to his lips before he could consider the wisdom of drawing any attention to the Klingon's state. He regretted it at once, as both Romulans shifted their eyes from Tain to Martok, and the warrior himself only blinked in vague acknowledgment of his title. Julian found himself doing some very rapid thinking. "Can you help me get him onto his bed?" he asked.

It wasn't what he had intended to say, and it probably wasn't wise to ask such an exertion of Martok. But his elbow had been given almost two weeks — real weeks, not the Dominion's interminable equivalent — to knit, and the pinkie finger was not instrumental to a solid lifting technique. In this moment, Julian sensed it was more important to give the General immediate occupation and a sense of purpose, however fleeting. Still more essential was to avoid the appearance of concern, while Enabran Tain was yet conscious. He was floating in an endorphin haze, clearly still enjoying the benefits of his implant, but that didn't mean he wasn't listening.

Martok rose, and Julian stepped around to his patient's head so that the warrior would move for the knees instead. With a couple of careful adjustments and a quick coordinating count, they lifted. Martok grunted, Tain groaned, and Julian felt the strain of the Cardassian's weight right up into his thoracic spine. But they didn't need to turn him, or even to carry him more than a couple of steps, and soon they were lowering him down onto the miserable cot with smooth control.

"Good," Julian said softly, turning to bend over Tain, feeling again for his pulse. The misted eyes skimmed over his face before settling on his own. "How are you feeling?"

Tain made the effort to sneer. "No invention is perfect, Doctor," he said raggedly, lips labouring unduly over the syllables. Julian laid his palm on the Cardassian's chest so that he could reassure himself that the rise and fall of his ribs was still smooth and orderly. "Not even mine."

Julian nodded in grave understanding. "The implant's switched off," he said. "You're in pain again."

"Hmph," grunted Tain. Julian adjusted the blanket draped over him, and then bent to retrieve the other, knotted on the floor. He shook it out and laid it over the other.

"I know this isn't much comfort," he said, softly enough that the others would have to strain if they wanted to hear; "but that's probably a good sign. If the stimulus has dropped below the threshold for the implant, it means the damage isn't getting any worse. If there's ischemia of your cardiac muscle, it's been arrested. It might even be resolving."

"If?" Tain hiccuped with a skeptical curl of the lip. "Might?"

Julian felt the barb lodge deep in his own heart. Intellectually he knew this failure was not his. Denied even the most rudimentary diagnostic tools and the most fundamental supplies, he could not possibly do more than he had done. What he had managed was not much short of miraculous, and by his old measures of success, this should have been a victory. But it did not feel like one. His brain might know he had done all he could. His soul demanded to know why he had not done more.

"That's the best I can give you," he whispered, trying to hold back his own despair for the sake of his patient. "I know it's not enough, but it's all I have."

Tain made a strange sound deep in his throat. It was low and barely audible, but forceful enough that it rocked the whole cot. The pipe fittings squeaked in protest, and the webbing beneath the thin mattress groaned.

"Has the reality of our situation defeated you at last, Doctor?" he said, and before Julian could voice a reflexive protest against this frightening but very compelling assessment, Tain shook his head. He freed his right hand from the blankets and patted absently, almost paternally, at the concave curve of Julian's torso arched above him. "Never mind. It means there's hope for you yet."

Julian's blood ran cold. Garak loved to say that. Those words, those words precisely. They sounded alien and yet so undeniably familiar upon the tongue of this man who was a twisted shadow-version of his wry and ever-smiling friend. They ripped open the chasm of the uncanny valley Julian always seemed to skirt when speaking to Tain: the feeling that there was more than a little of Garak in this man — or, far more dismaying to contemplate, more than a little of this man in Garak. Intellectually, it made sense. Everyone carried pieces of their mentors in their hearts and personalities. Julian himself borrowed this phrase or that from a respected professor, and his style of command owed much to Captain Sisko, and he didn't like to think about the parts of him that mirrored his father or his mother. Of course Garak resembled Tain in various subtle ways: the man had been his teacher and his dark commander for decades. That didn't mean Julian wanted to face that quite so explicitly.

 _There's hope for you yet_. The words haunted him long into the night.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary**

**postcentral gyrus:** part of the parietal lobe of the brain, responsible for the interpretation of the sense of touch (and so, the interpretation of pain).

 **mitral valve regurgitation:** backwash of blood from the left ventricle to the left atrium, caused when the valve between them does not close completely — either because it is damaged, or because the cardiovascular muscle surround it is not moving in a concerted fashion.

 **supraventricular tachycardia:** a class of arrhythmias involving the atria (upper chambers of the heart). While some forms of supraventricular tachycardia are not immediate medical emergencies, others can rapidly lead to cardiac arrest and death.

 **optronic defibrillator (tech.):** a small, handheld device used to shock a heart out of ventricular tachycardia or complete cardiac arrest back into normal rhythm.

 **sinus rhythm:** the normal beating of the heart, often expressed with the classic onomatopoeia "lub-dub".

 **Valsalva manoeuvre:** a diagnostic manoeuvre where the lips are sealed, the nose is pinched, and the patient attempts to blow against the seal with as much force as possible. Useful for equalizing pressure in the ears, as well as for cardiac diagnoses. Its use to correct SVT is  _not_  a gold standard of care, but can be useful in critical emergencies when more sophisticated methods are unavailable. (Colloquial translation: Don't Try This At Home, Kids!)

_And finally, nitpickers and naysayers: Stoplight has given you an in-canon explanation for why Julian's CPR compressions always look so shallow! You're welcome. (Because for some reason, not everyone is satisfied with the real-world explanation that it's not acceptable to break the ribs of your guest stars just to make a scene look "authentic"?) For those of you objecting to the fact that he doesn't administer any artificial respiration breaths to Gabriel Bell in "Past Tense", I need to add that a) compressions-only CPR is acceptable, and it is far safer for the rescuer than unprotected mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a stranger; and b) modern CPR requires 30 compressions followed by 2 breaths. Julian only makes it to 19 before Ben drags him away. Yes, I counted._

_[I know none of my lovely readers would volley such specious criticisms. These are objections that were raised in the '90s by people who were very harshly critical of Deep Space Nine, but not TNG or VOY, for a variety of foolish -- and sometimes very racist! -- reasons. I'm just taking this opportunity to set the official record straight, since it's not every day we get to talk about Julian's cardiothoracic chops... which are considerable!]_


	61. The River of Blood

**Part XI, Act II: The River of Blood**

Julian had no intention of sleeping that night. He took the pallet from his bunk, and laid it on the floor between the bench and Tain's cot. His pillow he tucked under the Cardassian's head, supporting it and the broad, cantilevered neck a little more adequately in the hope it would ease Tain's breathing. Sleeping supine was not an ideal position for a man of his size, but it seemed to be the position he favoured and now was not the time to cultivate new habits. If Tain was able to find some restful slumber, that would be enough tonight. Julian would simply have to watch him, and hopefully he would be catch any apneic episode in time to do something about it.

So, while the others went through their meagre evening routines and settled in to sleep, Julian sat down on his mattress with his shoulder-blades to the bench and his feet neatly side-by-side under Tain's bed. He pulled up his knees so his legs were tented, tucked a hand into each armpit, and tried to convince himself he was sitting comfortably. The pallet did little enough to pad the interwoven strips of webbing that formed the base of the beds: it was completely inadequate to cushion the stone floor. It didn't do much more than the flattened cardboard boxes in the Sanctuary District had done in that respect, but like the boxes, it did at least provide a little insulation against the cold.

With his patient now asleep and his adrenaline spent, Julian was shivering again. His hands and toes ached with the cold, and his fingertips were numb. Not for the first time he found himself reflecting on how the adaptability of his uniform — much touted by the designers at Starfleet Command — was really far more limited than advertised. It was comfortable and serviceable in the environment it was designed for; the controlled climate of a space station, where you were likelier to come across the heat of a circuit housing, or a busy reactor room, or a crowded Infirmary, than any sort of sustained cold. The intractable chill of space was kept at bay just as aggressively as its vacuum, because both were deadly. Often, Julian had been in situations where rooms ran warm (he spared a moment's grim nostalgia for a certain service conduit in which he'd once sheltered three dignitaries from a raging plasma fire). Only once, in five years of service in space, had he found himself huddled against the cold… at least until he'd arrived in this hell of the Founders' devising.

He was just about to draw out that memory from the treasure-vaults of his mind, intent upon lifting away the layers of fawn-coloured tissue paper to savour the palliative relief of fond recollection, when a shadow fell across his dusty knees. Julian blinked up at Martok. The General was holding out his own mattress, the one he never used.

"It is insufficient," the Klingon muttered, pitching his voice conscientiously low so as not to disturb Tain. "Yet perhaps it is better than nothing."

Julian took the floppy pad, its threadbare ticking coarse beneath his half-frozen fingertips. "Thanks," he said heavily. It wasn't really adequate, but it was all he could manage. He was exhausted, utterly spent by his day's labours and the merciless typhoon of emotions Tain had thrust him into — intentionally at first, with a dizzying quantity of malice aforethought, and then simply by his brush with death.

Martok nodded acknowledgement of his cellmate's gratitude, and then fixed his solitary eye on the unconscious Cardassian. Julian could see the question linger for a moment on the General's lips, but then he simply shook his head wearily, and moved off. A moment later, he was lowering himself onto his cot, back resolutely turned to the room.

Julian considered adding the second mattress to the first, but decided it was unlikely to make much difference to his coccyx. He slid it behind himself instead, forming an L with the other. It offered some padding to his shoulder-blades that way, as well as a buffer from the draught circulating almost imperceptibly through the room from the life support system. When he leaned back again, Julian felt a little warmer. He tucked his hands back into his axillae, trying to ignore the way his clothes stuck to his unwashed skin, and settled in for his long vigil.

His mind kept trying to turn back to Tain's unsettling words, to the way he had for a moment sounded so eerily like Garak. Julian's attempt to draw fire with random musings or bittersweet recollections of home proved unsuccessful, and so he did what he had always done when tormented by intrusive and unwanted thoughts: he distracted himself with work. He didn't have his Infirmary to tend or his dispensary to organize. He didn't have his computer terminal with its access to vast databases of learned journals and the amassed medical knowledge of hundreds of worlds. He didn't have his prion project or his nucleotide experiments or the latest batch of results from his ongoing Bajoran immunology study. What he had was the data from his nutritional survey, methodically gathered and meticulously stored in the ordered honeycomb of his academic mind.

It was incomplete: there were two barracks still unsurveyed, which meant twelve patients who had been given neither the opportunity to participate nor to refuse. They represented only six percent of the total prisoner population, and the overall response level Julian had garnered was excellent — he'd had only sixteen outright exclusions, either because prisoners had declined to be surveyed, or because communication barriers made it impossible. If he simply walked away from the remaining subjects, he would still be left with almost an eighty-six percent response rate — virtually unheard-of in voluntary, ethically-run studies. But it was the selection bias that troubled Julian. One of the two remaining barracks was last simply because some cell had to be. But the other was Barracks 22, and Julian had been deliberately avoiding it. That meant his bias, and his personal difficulties with the deceased Trel Lugek's accomplice, was colouring his sample pool. It was a well-established fact that such deliberate choices in formulating a study could have unseen and pernicious impact upon the integrity and validity of the results.

It was time for a compromise, and Julian hadn't ever been fond of compromise. It was a cornerstone of Federation life, a value imparted upon children from a very young age. But perhaps because of how he was raised, and certainly because of his parents' attitude that the ends justified the means even when those means were illegal, immoral, repugnant, and founded on a legacy of horrific abuses, Julian hated to yield any ethical line. It was wrong to exclude five patients — or six, if one of the recent newcomers from Gamma Quadrant worlds had taken Lugek's place — from his study simply because he had a personal conflict with one of them. He could have easily justified excluding his attacker alone, on the grounds that their turbulent history might colour either of their behaviour and lead to tainted results. But the man's cellmates were a different matter.

Yet as uncomfortable as it made him, Julian decided he would proceed in reviewing his results, even incomplete as they were. There was nothing he could do to correct the oversight now, and he was in desperate need of something to occupy his mind. It was the reason he'd conceived of this study in the first place, and it was time to move forward with it. So while he sat, trying not to shiver as he watched Tain's heavy slumber, he worked.

It was an interesting challenge, sifting and reorganizing the data in his mind without disrupting the original pathways through his memory that contained the information as it had been gathered. Julian did not often explore the scope of his neural processing power, at least not deliberately. There were countless shortcuts and mental computations he performed without consideration in the course of a normal day — if he even remembered what a normal day was, after weeks of abnormality — and he knew he had built up habits and adaptations that he wasn't even aware of. It was a little like the ability of the human brain to recognize a word at a glance, even if all the letters but its first and last were scrambled. His own brain was capable of far more sophisticated leaps in comprehension than that, and he had never explored them. It was curiously enticing to do so now; an intellectual challenge almost as intense as the process of gathering the data without external records in the first place.

Information gathered and manipulated in this way would never be admissible in a published study. In order to achieve Federation accreditation standards and peer-reviewed credentials, Julian had to show his work. But he wasn't preparing a study for publication. What he needed were the answers, results that he could use as a foundation for some kind of action he hadn't yet thought through. Sitting silently as the night deepened around him, he tallied up percentages and resorted categories of symptoms, and began to perform analysis of variance calculations — simple ones at first, but then increasingly complex measures taking into account variables such as age, species, length of imprisonment, body mass, and physical impediments.

He had sufficient data from three groups to draw statistically significant conclusions: Romulans, Cardassians, and Hunters were all represented in sufficient numbers. The seven Karemma were their own category: enough variation for clinical significance, but not enough to claim statistical authority. For most of the other species involved, Julian had too little information about their normal physiology to do anything useful. Then there were his two Alpha Quadrant outliers: General Martok, and Julian Bashir. For his own part, Julian hadn't been subsisting on the wretched Dominion gruel long enough to be showing signs of most nutritional deficiencies. In Martok's case, the length of imprisonment was considerable and Julian's understanding of Klingon physiology was tolerable, but with only one subject to examine, he could not claim to draw conclusions useful for extrapolation. All he could offer Martok was a diagnosis, and although  _terat rol_ remained a mystery, Julian thought he knew what was wrong with the Klingon.

It was the hot spot on his own lower gums that seemed to confirm it. While mulling over calculations of the incidence of various symptoms among the Cardassians, Julian had slowly become aware that his tongue kept wandering back to it. It was a raw little bump, between his right lateral incisor and the lining of his lip. He'd been dimly aware of it for a couple of days, but had written it off as somehow related to the blow he'd taken during their day of punitive lockdown. That was illogical: the sore hadn't formed until almost a full day after Martok had struck him, and it wasn't a traumatic injury. It was just a little bead of inflammation that stung when he ate his mush and radiated appreciable warmth when pressed to the tip of his tongue. But now he could feel a deeper tendril of faint fire snaking along the gum between two teeth, and when he ran his tongue around his mouth he found two more sores; one high on his left buccal wall, and one near the frontal midline of his hard palate.

By Earth reckoning, Julian had been in the prison camp for almost five weeks — a number he could only bear to contemplate in the most clinical of contexts. There were not many nutritional deficiencies that could make themselves felt in a previously healthy and well-fed human body in that time, but some of the water soluble vitamins depleted rapidly if removed entirely from the diet. One such vitamin was thiamine, the only thing Julian was absolutely certain the Dominion was indeed using to fortify its gruel. The sulphurous undertaste and the lingering smell were unmistakable. And thiamine deficiency manifested in weakness, tachycardia, impediment of reflexes, and peripheral neuropathy; not mouth sores. No, mouth sores were infamous, and they were a hallmark of another deficiency entirely.

Julian was mildly surprised he hadn't considered it before. He should have. His interest in history had for the most part been limited to the history of medicine, in which he boasted an impressive knowledge base. He had dabbled in mid-twentieth century geopolitics in some of his holosuite adventures, and as a small boy he'd gone through a phase of fascination with the history of the British monarchy. But the only other area he'd troubled to delve into as an adult — apart from a latecomer's exploration of the social upheavals precipitated by the Bell Riots, having had a very harsh first-hand lesson — was naval history. The rich and storied legacy of maritime exploration, commerce and warfare was an important part of Starfleet's mythology. From the galleys of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the Polynesian wayfarers who navigated their slender canoes over vast expanses of open ocean, to the many-masted European sailing vessels that had generally brought more trouble than they were worth to the continents and island nations they "discovered", to the sophisticated submarines and floating cities — both military and pleasurable — powered first by fossil fuels, then nuclear reactors, to the ships that had left the seas behind in favour of the stars, the evolution of the craft was honoured and remembered. It was sketched out as part of the orientation program at the Academy. It found its way into traditions ranging from promotion ceremonies and the bestowing of medals to shipboard weddings.

One particular intersection between naval and medical history was especially relevant to Julian's own regional identity, and the history of the country where he'd spent the largest part of his youth and childhood. The lengthy voyages of British sailing vessels the eighteenth century had led to an upsurge in the disease known as scurvy. It was characterized by fatigue, hair loss, myaglia, bleeding disorders, and deterioration of the gums. In what proved to be one of the first recorded, systematic clinical trials in human medicine, a physician by the name of Lind proved the curative link between citrus fruits and the painful and debilitating condition. This led to the implementation of a public health initiative in the British Royal Navy, whereby the sailors' rations were supplemented with the juice of lemons or limes. A century and a half before the discovery of ascorbic acid, empirical medicine had determined the means to treat its deficiency. The result was that British sailors swiftly became some of the healthiest in the West, and secured a naval dominance that had lasted well into the twentieth century.

The ramifications this had on the spread of Western colonialism aside, it had been a landmark moment in the history of medicine and Julian was embarrassed he hadn't thought of it before. It seemed like such an obvious nutrient to supply for any population that he hadn't even considered that the prison diet might be lacking in Vitamin C. Running his tongue along his gums again, though, he had to admit it fit well with both his symptoms, and Martok's.

He laid aside the statistical acrobatics for a moment as he tried to recall what he knew of Klingon cellular biology. On a chromosomal and molecular level, humans and Klingons were very similar despite their wide variation in gross anatomy. So similar, in fact, that they could procreate without medical intervention, and produce fertile children. Although Julian had never read up on the symptoms of scurvy in Klingons, he had studied their recommended daily intake of micronutrients as part of his professional development measures when Lieutenant Commander Worf joined the crew of Deep Space Nine. The Klingon requirement for ascorbic acid was considerably lower than that for humans — about one-twentieth, in fact — which made sense for a technically omnivorous species whose cultural diet was primarily carnivorous and helminthophagous. A lower requirement for ascorbic acid might mean a greater tolerance for frank deficiency — explaining, perhaps, how Martok could have endured this long without crippling symptoms.

That was assuming, because Julian didn't want to give too much credence to his increasingly paranoid suspicions about the Vorta, that Deyos had not simply had ascorbate removed from the prisoners' diet when a human arrived in the camp, knowing it would affect him swiftly and unpleasantly.

Many of the symptoms of scurvy could be masked by Martok's exertions in the ring. Declining replenishment of cartilage, impaired wound healing, muscle weakness: they were all symptomatic of and exacerbated by repeated, relentless combat trauma. But the ulcerated gums were a clear sign, and Julian's own were adequate confirmation. So he had found two oversights in their diet: ascorbic acid for humans and Klingons, dietary copper for Romulans.

Romulans used Vitamin C, too, or at least, Vulcans did. But because of their different evolutionary structures for fluid management and conservation, Vulcans could store water soluble vitamins as other species could not. It was loosely analogous to the human capacity to store fat-soluble vitamins in adipose cells. Assuming physiological equivalency, Parvok and Kalenna might go years without showing signs of deficiency, just as Julian's own body wouldn't start missing alpha-tocopherol for months. So the absence of scorbutic sores in the Romulan population did not preclude Julian's diagnosis.

He wished he knew if Cardassians needed Vitamin C. He hadn't looked into daily intake recommendations for Garak as he had for Worf, because Garak was a civilian and therefore his diet was his own concern. In Worf's case, Julian had to ensure that the emergency rations supplied on the  _Defiant_ and the runabouts would meet his needs if he was forced to rely upon them for any length of time. He had to know if Worf had any special requirements, in the event they were marooned together in a hostile environment. He had to be able to ensure the replicators were programmed to provide the Commander with the appropriate balance of essential nutrients, and to make arrangement for routine supplementation if any were needed. It was part of Julian's duty as Chief Medical Officer, just as he had to make certain the light fixtures in Lieutenant Vilix'Pran's quarters on the station and his berth on the  _Defiant_  supplied a sufficiently broad spectrum to support auxiliary photosynthesis, or that the Bolian officers consumed sufficient manganese dioxide. But in Garak's case…

If only he had been more curious, or focused his curiosity more productively, Julian might have a better understanding of Cardassian nutrition. But he had always been more fascinated by Garak's background and personal history, and on the occasions he had explored Cardassian anatomy and physiology, his focus had been narrow. Julian had lamented that before, when first attempting to assess Tain, and he revisited it now. It was just as an impossible  _if only_  as any that had raced through his mind while Tain's heart fluttered on the brink of collapse.

Julian was not proud of the way he'd comported himself in that situation. He had managed to maintain a professional façade, but the truth was that beneath it he had been distracted, disjointed, panicking. By running through unobtainable treatment options and losing himself in memories of lost patients, he had squandered precious milliseconds that could have proved the difference between life and death for the man beneath his hands. The only redeeming truth with which Julian could salve his shame was that he had not tarried on the thoughts that would have been tantamount to weighing the value of his patient's life: Tain's unfinished work on the transmitter measured against the terrible threat he had made earlier that evening. Julian hadn't maintained his concentration, but at least he'd clung to his clinical impartiality.

Something had changed in the room, and Julian abandoned his grim thoughts. His first concern was for Tain, but the Cardassian was still sound asleep, his heavy chest heaving rhythmically and sawing only faintly. A quick glance along the wall told Julian the change did not lie with Parvok or the Breen: both were still and as serene as any living thing could be in this hellish place. Julian slid his boots out from under Tain's cot and got to his feet with a nimble ease that was probably the final proof that his right knee was finally sound again.

Both Martok and Kalenna lay as they had when Julian had last looked their way. Kalenna was favouring her left hip, turned slightly onto her side towards the middle of the room, her face unlined and restful in what looked like Stage 3 sleep — for the moment, at least, blessedly out of the reach of her nightmares. Martok's back was turned, and he lay facing the wall. Had it not been for the subtle alteration in his breathing pattern, Julian would have believed him as deep in slumber as any of the others.

"General?" Julian said softly, approaching only as far as the foot of the cot. He did not want to intrude, but he felt he had to. There was something in the air: an ineffable sense of wrongness. His caregiver's instincts were piqued, and he was certain, without any evidence to support his feeling, that all was not well with the warrior.

Martok did not move. He did not speak. He gave no measurable sign that he had heard, save that the timbre of his breathing shifted again. It was more tense now; guarded. Julian took another step towards the broad-shouldered form beneath the miserable blanket.

"General," he said again. When no answer came, he closed the last metre between them, coming to stand at Martok's back. "I know you're not asleep. Are you in pain?"

It was the first thought that came to mind, even though it had been a small eternity since last the Klingon had been in the the ring with the Jem'Hadar. Certainly his left elbow could not be troubling him much: he was lying on that shoulder, and would not have done so if he'd needed to guard the joint. Julian earnestly hoped the General hadn't strained anything in the effort to lift Enabran Tain. He upbraided himself silently for not checking the man's fingers when the work was done.

"Martok," he tried. He laid his palm against the wall to brace himself, and leaned forward over the unmoving body. The shadow cast by his own shoulders and the gloom of the room did much to obscure the General's face, but Julian saw at once that he was correct: Martok was not sleeping. He was staring at the rivets in the wall with a battle-fatigued intensity that Julian knew too well. His good eye was glazed with haunted hollowness, but that wasn't all. There was a sheen to his lower lashes, and a tiny pool of fluid in the crevice of his nose. It looked like dew gathered in the cradle of a leaf, and it carried Julian momentarily back to another lifetime and a far-away world where the village lanes were reticulated by low garden walls of ancient stone and the summer nights were cool and still. But it wasn't dew, of course. It was the secretion of lachrymal goblet cells strewn throughout the Klingon's conjunctiva. As Julian watched, the reservoir overflowed, and a trickling rivulet cut across the bony bridge of the nose. Tears, still flowing.

Martok was weeping.

Julian did not know what to do. It seemed unthinkable to acknowledge what he was seeing, and yet he could not simply slink away. Martok was no fool. He knew now that Julian had witnessed this profoundly private thing. Worse, if Julian withdrew now he would be abandoning not only his patient, but his friend to whatever demons had come to him by night.

"It's been a long day," he said quietly, knowing how preposterous the platitude must sound but leaning on it anyway. All days were long here — doubly so for a Klingon who had grown up on rapidly-rotating Qo'noS. "Have you slept at all?"

At first, it seemed like Martok was not going to respond. The vacant, far-seeing stare did not alter, nor did the pattern of his breathing. Now that he was nearer, Julian could hear the ragged hitch deep in his throat. The cords of his thickly muscled neck stood out tautly, tension and anguish apparent in every sharp contour. His proud mouth was pressed into a thin line. He was a man lost in the dark grip of his own mind.

Then he spoke, but not to answer Julian's question. "Is he dead?" he asked, his voice low and bitterly empty.

"Tain?" said Julian. "No. He's asleep. His breathing isn't as regular as I'd like, but it hasn't stopped yet. His heart's still beating. As far as I can tell, he's simply exhausted."  _And in pain_ , he added to himself. The heavy slumber the Cardassian had fallen into was probably the only relief his body could offer him right now, while the strain in his chest was wretched, but not intense enough to trigger his neural implant.

" _Will_  he die?" asked Martok. His jaw scarcely moved with the words. His eye was still locked on the riveted tritanium plate before him.

There was no lie Julian could offer. "I don't know," he said. "I can't diagnose him properly. Without medication or a cardiac stimulator, there's very little I can do to improve his prognosis, whatever it is. All I can do, all any of us can do, is hope."

"Hope." Martok spat the word, and his ribcage jerked with the force of it. Finally his eyeball pivoted to find Julian's face, bitter and tormented. "What hope is there here? Tain was our hope, and now what? He cannot go back in the wall, not in the state he's in. And if he dies…" A shudder tore through his broad frame, and the bunk creaked beneath him. "If he dies, our  _hope_  dies with him. We were so close, Doctor. So close. Now all is lost."

"No," said Julian softly. "All's not lost. Do you remember what you told me, the day I despaired? The day the Vorta told me the Cardassian had died of his beating?"

Martok snorted, and looked away. Back to the rivets; but now, at least, he seemed to actually be looking at them, not through them. "That was an age ago," he muttered.

"Yes," Julian agreed. He could have argued, quoted the precise number of days in any reckoning they liked — Dominion, Federation Standard, Klingon, Bajoran. He probably could have calculated it down to the hour, or nearly. But he didn't.  _An age ago_. That felt right, anyway, even if it wasn't objectively true. "You told me that there is hope, even when we can't see it."

The noise Martok made now was midway between a hiss of repudiation and one of the sobs he had obviously been holding at bay. A fresh tear beaded on his lower eyelid and rolled toward his nose. "I was speaking of Tain!" he scoffed. "Of the transmitter. Now both are useless."

Julian couldn't give the reassurance he longed to offer, for his own sake as much as Martok's. Still, he did his best. "Not useless," he said. "It's possible Tain will regain enough strength to return to work, and if he can't, he might be able to talk one of us through the last few steps."

But he'd seen the inside of that circuit housing, and the impossible nest of tangled wires and optronics. None of it was labelled. None of it was even remotely familiar. Very little of it seemed designed to work together. Maybe Miles O'Brien, master of meshing disparate technologies, might have been able to make sense of it with a little coaching; but it was far beyond the scope of anything Julian had learned in his Engineering extension courses. Attuned synapses, sharp eyes, and preternatural intelligence were all very well, but they were no substitute for training and experience. It would take weeks for Tain to teach Julian what he needed to know in order to finish modifying the defunct life support generator, and it was all too likely that Enabran Tain did not  _have_  weeks. Not if Julian couldn't get him to a proper medical facility.

He doubted Martok had even as much engineering expertise as he possessed. If Parvok or Kalenna had such talents, they'd never mentioned them. If anyone was to finish the work in a timely fashion, it would have to be Tain, and Martok was right: at the moment, he was in no fit state to be on his feet for hours in a cramped and airless space.

"You do not understand, Doctor," said Martok. In his voice, Julian could hear the chasm of despair within him. "Before they came, before the life support unit was discovered, before there was hope of building a transmitter, I had nothing. No escape but death, the Jem'Hadar say, and even death was denied me. Ikat'ika took my eye, and they patched me up sooner than allow me an honourable death. Only the battles in the ring sustained me, and they were not enough. I could see the years stretch before me, endless and without hope, as I grew old and feeble, worthless even for the entertainment of their youngest soldiers. Years without honour. Years without purpose. Years of remembering all that has been taken from me."

Julian's mouth was too dry to permit speech. He could envision such a future all too clearly. Once, he had experienced in his mind what it was to walk through the decades of life, growing unsteady and decrepit, inexplicable pain in every joint, each limb weighed down with the years. The thought of enduring that here, while far away in another corner of the Galaxy life went on without him… it was terrifying. He hadn't had to face that before, not really. At first he'd been certain rescue would come. Then there had been Tain and his transmitter. Was that hope dead? It couldn't be. It mustn't be. It mustn't be.

"Never to lay eyes on my beloved Lady again," Martok murmured hollowly. "Never to stand proud at the marriages of my children. Never to see my firstborn son grow into the dignity that still eludes him, nor to watch as my daughter teaches her daughter to wield a bat'leth. Never to stand in the Hall of Warriors again, nor to speak out before the High Council. Never to walk the deck-plates of a Klingon vessel again, as we soar into honourable battle. Never to avenge my honour upon my tormentors. Never to live again, Doctor. To breathe and eat and fight, maybe, but never to  _live_!"

His voice rose upon that last word, like the final swell of a Klingon aria. Julian flinched reflexively, thinking belatedly of the others, trying to sleep. On the other side of the barracks, Tain mumbled something inarticulate, but he slumbered on. Martok had turned his head at last, and he was looking up at Julian with desperate intensity.

"When the dishonoured dead take their final journey on the barge sailed by Kortar," he said; "the Kos'karii lurk within the river of blood. They call out to the dead, tempting them with the voices of those they loved in life. If a fallen warrior yields, he is carried away on the current and lost forever, denied even the lonely fellowship that waits amid the torments of Gre'thor. An eternity of nothingness, Doctor. Only dishonour and the memory of failure even at the final test. Do you understand?"

Julian nodded. "Purgatory," he whispered. "On Earth, some cultures call that Purgatory."

Martok nodded, baring his teeth. " _This_  is the river of blood," he hissed. "And we have fallen from the barge."

It took a tremendous effort to swallow against a parched, strained throat. "I know it seems that way at times," Julian said, forcing the words past numb lips with what sounded to his jaded ears like unearthly calm. "But isn't it only the river of blood if it has no end?"

Martok chuckled softly, shaking his massive head in disbelief. "The Cardassian spoke wrongly, Doctor," he said. "You are not defeated. I am beginning to think you are unconquerable. Do you truly, even now, believe there is hope of escape?"

"Yes," said Julian, and he was shocked to realize that he meant it. "Of course there's still hope."

Martok's eye narrowed. "Why?" he challenged.

There was only one answer to that. Julian couldn't dissemble, or invent some more encouraging lie. He simply spoke it. "Because there has to be."

( _fade_ )

* * *

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary:**

**apneic episode:** an occurrence of apnea, in which breathing stops suddenly but typically very briefly during sleep.

 **buccal wall:**  the inner lining of the cheek.

 **alpha-tocopherol:** one of eight fat-soluble micronutrients grouped under the colloquial name of Vitamin E.

 **lachrymal goblet cells (exo.):** columnar cells embedded in the epithelium of the Klingon eyelid, responsible for secreting lachrymal fluid for eyeball lubrication and tear production. Klingons are said to lack tear ducts (ST VI: "The Undiscovered Country"), and yet tears feature in Klingon mythology (TNG 6.17, "Birthright, Part II") and are shed by Kurn in 4.15, "Sons of Mogh". Martok references his own weeping in 5.21, "Soldiers of the Empire", although he does not specifically mention tears. As Klingons do not have tear ducts and yet are demonstrably able to produce tears, they must do so via an alternate mechanism. Hence, lachrymal goblet cells.


	62. Manipulating the Count

**Part XI, Act III: Manipulating the Count**

Eventually, Martok found sleep again and Julian returned to his post at Tain's bedside. His own exhaustion was deepening, and he found himself scrubbing at stinging eyes long before the first of his cellmates began to stir towards morning wakefulness.

It was Kalenna, and she came to him as soon as she was out of bed. Her face was very grave, her eyes unsettled with wordless concern. "Doctor?" she asked, several desperate questions rolled into one.

"He slept through the night," said Julian, tackling only the most obvious of them. "His breathing has grown a little less laboured. I'll need to wake him soon, so I can make a more thorough assessment."

"What are we going to do about the count?" the Major asked.

A fist of dread closed around Julian's trachea. He hadn't considered the count. If any allowance was made for the ill or the injured, he had never seen it. Tain would have to muster for roll call, but how could he possibly endure it? The only thing Julian could prescribe for his patient was bed rest, and the idea of forcing a man who might well have suffered a myocardial infarction last night to stand at attention for ninety minutes or more was sickening.

"I could speak to the Vorta," he tried, the words tripping over one another in a hurried exhalation.

Kalenna shook her head. "He'll never make an exception," she said. "And you would be punished for your pains. Tell me, Doctor: if you are vaporized, or put in isolation, or beaten so that you cannot stand, who will tend your patient? Who will listen to Tain's heart then, or perform another miracle like the one you worked last night, if the need arises?"

She was right, but Julian could not reconcile himself to the inevitable. "There must be something we can do," he said despairingly.

"No, Doctor, I'm afraid there isn't," a hoarse but sardonic voice huffed. Julian and Kalenna both turned their attention to the cot, where Tain still lay upon his back. His left hand meandered out of the layered blankets and splayed across his breastbone. He coughed once, shallowly, and worked his dry lips. Hurriedly, Julian tucked his legs into a half-lotus so that he could lean forward to reach beneath the cot for the Cardassian's all-but-empty canteen. While he fumbled with it, Tain added; "I'm just going to need to get my legs under me, and that's all there is to it."

"How are you feeling?" Julian asked. He shifted onto his calves and knelt up beside the bed. "How intense is your pain?"

"Pain? What pain?" Tain obfuscated. But the grimace he made as he tried and failed to roll onto his right shoulder were answer enough. Julian laid a hand on his far arm, and pressed him gently back down.

"Easy," he said. He nudged the bottle against Tain's hand, and the Cardassian took hold of it. "I'm going to get a hand behind your shoulders, and I'll help you sit up a little."

"I'm not an invalid," Tain said sourly, but he didn't resist as Julian helped him get his head and shoulders off the pillow. His broad hand shook as he tipped the vessel to his lips, and the effort of imbibing seemed to exhaust him. When he swallowed the last dregs of his water ration, he sagged back against Julian's arm, panting shallowly.

"I need to check your pulse," Julian said, his free hand hovering in the ready position, six inches short of the mark, until Tain gave the barest nod of accession. "I know it hurts too much to breathe deeply, but try to breathe slowly."

Tain made a noise of ornery discontent, and took a deliberately deep breath. It caught high in his throat with a thin wheeze of sudden anguish, and it came out in a series of quick, barking coughs. Where his spine transected Julain's radius, the physician could feel the seismic tremor of pain that ripped through his patient's toiling body. Tain subsisted rapidly into thin gasps again.

"You know, it's not necessary to argue with  _everything_  I say," Julian said dryly, sensing that a little sarcasm would do far more to put the old man at ease than empathy or care possibly could. He planted his hand against the ridged eye socket, and found the temporal pulse. He counted, willing his fingers to divine not only the interval, but the rhythm of the heartbeat and the Cardassian's blood pressure. It was impossible, of course. He could only guess at the latter, and the former would require another session of trying to hear Tain's heart through the layers of cloth, flesh, bone, and connective tissue.

Sometimes, enhanced senses were detrimental; a burden he'd just as soon do without. In this situation, they were his only compensation for the dearth of instruments. Julian folded back the blankets and pushed Tain's two outer layers of clothing out of the way. "Will you let me listen?" he asked. Even now, he was unwilling to forgo the standards of consent.

"Can we just assume that if I don't want you to touch me, I'll stop you, Doctor?" Tain growled. The words ground past set molars. He was clenching his jaw against the pain. "This is tiresome."

"Blanket consent," said Julian. "All right. Try to hold your breath for twenty seconds."

He laid his ear to the Cardassian's chest, and listened. His heart muscle was moving in a concerted fashion, but the firing of the nodes was off. There was a faint murmur that skipped through each beat, and Julian could hear the slosh of residual blood after each ventricular contraction. Tain's ejection fraction was reduced. Worse, there was a crackling in his lungs that hadn't been there before: fluid, filling the deep alveoli. As much as Julian wanted to tell himself he couldn't be certain without a tricorder, he knew the truth. There was ischemic damage to the cardiac muscle. Last night's episode hadn't been simple arrhythmia. Tain had suffered a transient but certainly not minor heart attack.

"You can't report for the count," he said at last, sinking back onto his heels and trying to look Tain squarely in the eyes. It wasn't easy, when the man seemed entranced by the light fixture over the bed. "You need to avoid exertion. If you don't—"

"If I fail to report, they'll come for me," said Tain. "Death by plasma rifle is quick, Doctor, but not something I'd care to experience. I refuse to accept it meekly. If you are so bent on respecting your patients' wishes, respect  _mine_. You will get me to my feet, and you will help me out into the yard. Once there, staying upright will be my problem, not yours."

Julian wanted to argue, but he saw it was useless. Tain had been here for almost two years. He knew, as Julian still did not, the specific consequences of failing to appear for roll call. If it was a death sentence, he could not fail. And if there was no other way to win leniency from the Vorta, he would have to report. But he might not have to stand all morning.

"What if there's a way to cut the count short?" asked Julian, looking from Tain to Kalenna with desperate hope in his eyes. "It doesn't always drag on endlessly. We've had quick counts before."

"Yes," Kalenna agreed. "The day after you corrected Deyos, when he didn't try his little game. But that certainly won't work again: if you ever interrupt him again, I think he'll kill you."

Julian wasn't so sure of that. He had a feeling there was still a prohibition on his life, either from Tiellyn or from the Founders themselves. But he did know that defiance would be punished, swiftly and cruelly. Even if he was only forced to endure another morning on his knees, counting until his throat was raw and his brain was numb, that would be a morning during which he couldn't monitor Tain.

"That can't be the only reason the count runs short," he said hurriedly. "Is it? Has it never been quick for any other reason?"

"Only when the Vorta doesn't perform it," said Kalenna. "The Jem'Hadar have no interest in such games. It requires a subtlety and an appetite for fiendish restrain they do not possess. Swift, bloody violence is their passion, not slow torment."

"Of course," said Julian, nodding. "When Deyos is otherwise engaged, Ikat'ika takes over the count. And it's quick?" The only times this had happened during his tenure in the camp,  _he_  had been the reason Deyos was otherwise engaged.

"Very quick," Kalenna agreed. "The guards performing the inspections do not always have time enough to finish."

Julian bobbed his head again, this time trying to put the seal on his courage. "Then all we have to do is make sure Deyos has something more pressing to do."

Tain snorted, but there was not much force to the sound. His palm was moving in tight circles over his sternum, massaging his chest as if it could relieve the ache within. It almost would have been kinder if he'd been in greater agony. Then, the implant would have activated again to mask the torture. As it was, he was caught between that relief, and the genuine absence of pain.

"Just what did you have in mind?" he mocked. "Invite yourself to breakfast in his office?"

"I could talk to him about my nutritional study," said Julian, grasping at straws. "I don't have an answer to the Cardassians' problem, but it's established that the Romulan prisoners need dietary copper, and Martok and I—"

"You haven't been listening," Kalenna said, and for the first time in weeks, she sounded irritated with him. "You can't be the one to step forward this time, Doctor. You're needed here, present, conscious, and unscathed. Someone else will have to engage the Vorta."

"Are you volunteering, Major?" chuckled Tain. "All your efforts to keep a low profile… would you really throw them away for this?"

What he meant was  _would you really throw them away for me?_  He didn't seem able to say that, however, and Julian wasn't truly surprised. Tain wanted to test Kalenna's loyalty, to gauge whether she would actually hold fast to her commitment to their improbable band of conspirators when it meant sticking her neck out for  _him_ , not merely those among them she saw as friends. But he didn't wish to be seen to need her.

"I have made myself conspicuous before," said Kalenna, jerking her chin towards the wall panels with the shaved-down bolts. "Or have you forgotten?"

There was more strength and grim delight in Tain's voice when he answered than there had been since he was stricken. "My dear, I am like the Algorian mammoth," he said with relish. "I forget nothing."

Kalenna favoured him with a terse thinning of the lips. Then she turned to Julian, all dour professionalism. "I will occupy the Vorta. It will fall to you, Doctor, to keep our wearisome leader on his feet."

Julian nodded. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all they had.

 _(fade_ )

Helping Tain to rise was a difficult ordeal. The cot was not sturdy enough to provide a solid base for him to push off from, and the space between it and the bench was narrow enough that only two people could help him. This time, Julian enlisted Parvok instead of Martok. The Klingon was on his feet and pacing before the door lost its nightly seal, and he seemed only too willing to quit the barracks the instant he was able. Julian thought it wise to let him do so: the nadir of the spirit he had endured in the night would only have exacerbated the struggle for self-control that had been ongoing since the lockdown.

Parvok was not as strong or as sure as the Klingon warrior, but he was a fair sight stronger than a human of his size, condition, and relative age would have been. He seemed determined to do his share, and he managed for the most part to ignore Tain's wheezing mockery as he helped Julian heave the Cardassian to his feet. Tain flung them both off then, and made as if to stride for the door. He got as far as the outermost bench before his knees buckled. Had it not been for Julian's vigilance and the hyper-responsive reflexes of his unnatural body, Tain might well have crashed to the floor. As it was, Julian was able to prop him up long enough to steer him onto the table, where Tain sat heaving and struggling for air for twenty endless seconds until suddenly his pain-creased face grew slack and his burning eyes vacantly blissful.

He had hit his threshold. The implant had been activated again.

Julian and Kalenna left Parvok to put the barracks to rights, as he did so diligently every morning. On either side of the Cardassian, they gave Tain their arms as he lumbered slowly to the door and out into the corridor. He was no longer feeling his pain, but only a couple of steps left him winded and labouring. There was nowhere to pause to rest, nowhere he could sit for a moment to catch his breath. They could have eased him to the floor, save that Julian suspected that once they got Tain down there, they wouldn't be able to get him up again. He had to stand. That was all there was to it.

Martok intercepted them as they toiled past the pillar. He took Kalenna's place on Tain's left side, letting the Cardassian grip his bracer rather than his hand with its last two fingers still splinted together. The klaxon sounded and the prisoners began to arrange themselves into the four parallel lines. There was no question of Julian and Martok taking their usual positions in the front row, at the very end of the line nearest the combat ring. There was a reason no one but the Klingon and the foolhardy Starfleet officer dared to take those places: they were far too conspicuous. Today, they needed to try to avoid scrutiny. Martok shoved aside two Romulans to clear a place about a third of the way in from the end of the back row. The nearest Cardassian caught sight of Enabran Tain, and fled forward of his own accord. Both Martok and Julian made a show of squaring off to attention, trying to hide the fact that each of them was still lending an arm to the sagging invalid between them.

It was Kalenna, on most mornings circumspectly tucked away herself, who fell into Julian's customary place. She was holding herself with more than the usual rigid dignity. She looked almost queenly with her shoulders thrust back and her head held high. The look of glacial determination on her face was inspiring, but Julian knew it was hiding a bedrock of dread. He knew because he felt exactly the same thing for her. He wondered what her plan was, but he had not presumed to ask. She was still the woman who had carved out a successful career in the cutthroat Tal Shiar while harbouring a secret even from the secret-gatherers. She was more than an equal for the venal, cruel little Vorta.

Still, he was not prepared for what happened when Deyos and his flanking escort of Jem'Hadar emerged from the administration corridor. They started for the far end of the opposite line of prisoners, as always, but they had not crossed the midline of the atrium when Kalenna broke formation. She stepped away from her place and strode towards them at a brisk, resolute clip. Her down-at-heel shoes shushed and slapped against the composite floor, and every pair of hungry, haunted eyes followed her.

She was almost halfway down the columns before the Jem'Hadar reacted. The two more junior soldiers stepped forward, plasma rifles instantly at the ready and trained upon the Romulan woman. Kalenna did not flinch. She did not even pause. Deyos stared at her in mild astonishment, head tilted far to one side. He raised a dismissive hand to the Jem'Hadar.

"Wait," he said. Then of Kalenna he demanded, coldy; "What is the meaning of this?"

"I need a word with you, sir," she said, as crisply and calmly as if reporting to a long-trusted superior. "I regret I could find no more opportune time to do so."

Even at this distance, Julian could see the look of guileless fascination in Deyos's eyes. He suspected no ulterior motive, as he would have done if Julian had been the one to step forward. He wasn't looking for defiance from Kalenna. He was simply curious — positively burning with curiosity, in fact, if his expression was any indication. Julian had suspected before now that Deyos, just like the Jem'Hadar, had to struggle against the tedium of his posting from time to time. Why else would he take such delight in toying with his prey? His reaction now seemed to bear out the theory: he looked like he'd just been handed a marvellous new diversion.

" _Really_?" he said, breathy with delight. "And just what is it you need to say?"

Kalenna made a great show of glancing from side to side with just the right melange of uneasy disdain. "It is a private matter," she muttered, so that Julian's keen ears only just caught the words.

Deyos's malicious grin broadened. "Is it, indeed?" he asked, looking her over from top to toe and back again.

Both Starfleet's intelligence on the Vorta and Odo's understanding of them held that their species had been genetically engineered to feel no sexual desire. Some Vorta seemed to have a knack for faking flirtatious interactions and for playing upon the tastes of other species — from what Julian had heard of the one named Kilana, the attempts were good but not natural.  _Chilling_  was the word Captain Sisko had used. So he didn't think Deyos was drawn to Kalenna for that reason, but it would have been the natural assumption to make about the way he was looking at her now.  _Like a viper about to devour its prey_ , Julian thought, with a shiver of fear. Tain's hand, still surreptitiously clinging to him for support, clenched suddenly so that the cold fingertips dug between the long bones of his forearm. A tendon rolled painfully.

"Be still," the Cardassian hissed, the small words snagging deep in his throat. He was still short of breath.

"Yes," Kalenna said, a little less circumspectly. Then she closed the distance between herself and the Vorta with two small, swift steps, and rose onto her toes to whisper something in his ear.

Deyos made no move to touch her, but the Jem'Hadar around him shifted back into readiness. They were not about to take the chance that this prisoner might have some concealed weapon, intending an assassination attempt. But the Vorta's eyes widened as he listened, and his expression shifted to one of intrigued disgust. When Kalenna settled back on her heels, he sneered at her.

"Is that so? How repulsive," he said. He took her by the arm and turned her towards the far end of the atrium. "You two, with me," he said to the Jem'Hadar with the rifles at the ready. "First Ikat'ika, you will complete the count!"

And without further preamble he strode off, obliging Kalenna to trot along beside him as the prisoners watched in bewildered incredulity. Julian could scarcely believe it himself: everything had gone precisely according to plan. Ikat'ika was already counting off by twos with a swift efficiency that suggested the entire process was unlikely to take longer than fifteen minutes, klaxon to dismissal. They would be able to get Tain back to the barracks and off his feet more promptly than Julian could have dared to hope.

He only prayed that whatever Kalenna had put forward as a diversion, it would not lead Deyos to punish her too brutally.

 _(fade_ )

The hour they spent waiting for their comrade's return was a long and dreadful one for the occupants of Barracks 6. Martok was unsettled, pacing the back wall and muttering periodically in a dialect of the Klingon tongue that Julian's Universal Translator couldn't parse. Parvok didn't even bother to perch on his bunk: he simply sank to the floor with his back pressed into the corner, clenching his hands into one interlaced fist as if trying to restrain the urge either to fidget or to bite his nails to the quick. The Breen was serene, and Julian envied them — either their obliviousness or, as seemed more likely, their stalwart composure in the face of dread. He would have struggled far more with his own if he hadn't had a patient to attend to.

Tain had only been abroad for a few minutes, but they had taken a terrible toll. He was perspiring copiously, his cold skin slick with sweat. His pulse was pounding and it wandered beneath Julian's fingertip when he reached to measure it. The implant was still pumping out endorphins, which meant that the Cardassian was indeed in a tremendous amount of pain even if his brain couldn't interpret it. He seemed to alternate between blissfully drunk, and desperate for air. He had to sit on the bench for a few tortuous minutes while Parvok slipped into the wall to retrieve the makeshift bedpan, and then the others helped Tain to bed.

Julian did his best to prop his patient into a position that would encourage steady circulation, but there was only so much he could do. Martok's mattress supplemented the Cardassian's, and Julian used everyone's pillows to chock up Tain's shoulder-blades and head. Then he gathered up the blankets and bundled the aged body as warmly as he could. The pervasive cold of orbital night was putting a strain on the man's heart that Tain could ill afford.

There was not much more that Julian could do. He tried to settle on the bench at his patient's bedside, but rapidly found himself perched on its edge instead of sitting comfortably, curled forward over his lap with his elbows on his thighs and his palms pressed together. He couldn't keep from chafing them. He was afire with anxious energy, despite the fact that he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours or more. He feared for Tain. He feared for Kalenna. He feared for their prospects of escape. And although he didn't really let himself face the fact, he was waiting for a second cardiac event like a seismologist waiting for the big quake after the first warning tremor.

When the door flew open with its customary shriek-and-a-bang, Julian almost leapt out of his skin. He was on his feet and whirling to face the entrance almost before the person who'd opened it could step into the threshold. It was Kalenna, looking calm, unruffled, and utterly unscathed.

Julian wanted to run to her, to cry out for joy to see his friend alive and ambulatory, but he couldn't find his voice. He simply gawked as she strode calmly into the centre of the room, listened with a slightly cocked head for the squall of the door's closing, and then fixed her eyes on Martok.

"Good news, General," she said with a wry little lilt of guarded amusement. "I am not with child. You will have nothing to explain to your wife."

Julian whirled to glance at Martok, who was thunderstruck by this pronouncement and didn't seem able to make sense of what the Major had just said. Even Julian's lightning-quick brain was sluggish: it took him one whole heartbeat to remember that the subterfuge Kalenna had used in order to get in to see the General after the loss of his eye was that she was his paramour. Tiellyn, she'd explained, had been morbidly fascinated by the idea of interspecies mating rituals. Apparently she had tried the same pretext on Deyos, with similar results.

" _That's_ what you told the Vorta?" he blurted out, unsure whether to laugh or to moan. It seemed such an undignified narrative to take on, and surely a painful one for Kalenna, pining as she was for her beloved and her child on far-away Romulus. It wasn't especially comfortable for Martok, either. Two loyal and loving spouses, playacting infidelity for the sake of escape… it was at once ironic and troubling.

Kalenna shrugged one thickly padded shoulder. "I told him I suspected the possibility. He was intrigued. He said he was unaware it was possible for a Klingon and a Romulan to produce offspring without artificial aids."

"Is it?" Julian said weakly. He was too tired for any of this, and he took the opportunity to sink back onto the bench. He brought his right boot up onto it, though, so he could curl an arm around his knee and keep his eyes on Kalenna.

She looked at him and arched an eyebrow in one of the most elementally Vulcan expressions in the Universe. Her sinus ridges didn't detract from the clear kinship.

"Yes," she said simply. She offered no further information, nor any explanation of how she could be so certain of this when Romulans and Klingons were such ancestral enemies and unlikely, so far as Julian could see, to procreate together. Instead she brushed the front of her tunic with her palms and went calmly to sit on her stripped-down bunk. "Deyos examined me, and asked some questions of the sort that would be considered in very poor taste among most civilized species. He was disappointed to find that I am  _not_  with child, of course. I think he was envisioning the whole thing as some sort of perverse experiment he could manipulate at will."

"And he released you unharmed?" asked Martok blackly, stumping past Julain to sit down on the other bench. He rolled his left shoulder, extending his elbow into one of the stretches he'd learned as part of his ongoing physical therapy.

"Yes," Kalenna said again. Julian had to admire the intricacy of the distraction. To a species that was cloned, sexual reproduction and pregnancy would hold a morbid fascination, and it was unlikely Deyos had encountered such a situation before. He could not have imagined a more elegant diversion. Kalenna nodded towards Tain. "How did he bear up during the count?"

"He did well," Julian said, a little more pointedly than he would have done if he hadn't been certain his patient was listening. Tain wouldn't accept direct praise, but that didn't mean he was immune to the need for affirmation after a bitter ordeal. "But he needs to stay where he is for the rest of the day. We'll have to share our rations with him: he can't go out to draw his. And he certainly won't be going back in the wall."

"I'll be the judge of that, Doctor," Tain said. His voice was hoarse, and it wavered, but the underlying steel of determination was unmistakable.

Julian turned on him. "Not today, you won't," he said sternly. "It was abominably foolish to get you up for the count, but we didn't have any choice. You're not moving again until tomorrow morning, when once again  _we won't have a choice_."

He didn't add that it would be dangerous, perhaps suicidally so, to try to deflect Deyos from performing the count himself two days in a row. That was a worry that could wait, at least as far as his patient and cellmates were concerned. Maybe his mighty brain could cook up a solution in the meantime? It was worth a try.

Tain snorted. "If you think I'm going to use that bedpan like some kind of doddering old goat…"

"You don't need to use it if you don't want to," said Julian with the particular equable insolence he'd honed to a precision weapon in his turbid adolescence; "but you're not getting up to visit the toilets, so I suggest you reconsider that position."

Tain laughed, or tried to. The first barking chuckle cut off into a wheeze, and then a thin wince of pain. "Damnable thing," Tain muttered. "I should have insisted on a lower activation threshold."

As awful as it was to sink back into pain, Julian knew it was a good sign. Constant agony that rose to the level of the kind of torture an Obsidian Order operative had to guard against was an extremely worrisome clinical sign. Few things were more excruciating than ischemic necrosis, and that was the great fear at this point: that another infarction would cause more of Tain's heart do die, perhaps taking him with it. He didn't say any of this to Tain, however. Instead, he offered a heavy little sigh of bone-deep weariness.

"Don't talk," he advised. "Just keep breathing, all right? That's all we need from you for now."

For once, Tain didn't argue.

 _(fade_ )

Before heading out to ration call, Julian knelt down beside his cot and dragged out his case of medical supplies. He wasn't concerned about the water ration, or at least no more concerned than he was on any other day. They'd each give Tain three hundred and fifty millilitres, and everyone would have only a slightly leaner share than usual. What concerned him was that Tain's body was already under a tremendous amount of strain, and in these circumstances a fast was the last thing he needed. Prisoners weren't permitted to remove their plates from the mess area, and the Dominion overseers assumed there was no way to smuggle any of the rancid mush back to the barracks. Generally, that was probably true. A prisoner could try to take a handful, but in order to do so surreptitiously, they'd only be able to hide a few grams: the Jem'Hadar would notice cupped hands overflowing with stewed grain, and react appropriately. But trying to hide food in pockets — for those prisoners whose garments, unlike Starfleet uniforms, incorporated pockets — or hems or sleeves would be messy and profoundly unsanitary. What was required in order to smuggle an edible portion of food was a container, small enough to be readily hidden but large enough to hold a useful portion. Julian had just such a container in mind.

It would mean sacrificing the sterility of one of his precious dressings, but the circumstances were desperate enough that Julian was willing to do so. Tain couldn't endure a three-day fast, which was what one missed meal amounted to. In this circumstance, food was just as essential as a sterile pad would be for a patient who was bleeding to death. So Julian took one of the packets, and carefully slit open the foil pouch. He plucked out the bandage inside, and laid it back among the others in the bottom of the all-but-empty cargo canister. By tenting the bottom of the foil pouch, he had a crude cup that would hold about a third of one prisoner's food ration. He tested this, eyeing his improvised creation with grim satisfaction, and then flattened it again so he could slip it up his right cuff. On that side, he still had a sleeve left on his grey turtleneck. The snugly fitted, knit fabric clung to his forearm and trapped the foil envelope against it. It was secure, it was hidden, and it would be easy to extract when he needed it.

The others were already outside, and he rocked to his feet. He moved to Tain's side, looking down at the closed eyes and the strained crevices around the old man's mouth and brows. "I'll be as quick as I can," he said quietly. "You're not allowed to have another crisis until I get back. Do you understand me? You can have your way in everything else, Tain, but you need to obey me in this."

Tain only grunted and moved his right hand in an idle swatting gesture before folding it back over the left. Julian suspected the weight of his palms soothed the ache in his ribs.

"All right," he whispered. Then, just because he very badly needed a moment to feel like his old, cheeky self, he added; "Best of British luck."

Then he slipped out the door, wishing there was some way to muffle its hateful cacophony.

 _(fade_ )


	63. Three Patients

_Note: Review replies are coming, but I'm running on low reserves right now. It's been a bad pain week. I hope nobody minds that I prioritized posting the chapter first; I feel like it's been long enough between updates! Cheers._

**Part XI, Act IV: Three Patients**

Ikat'ika could not have know how serendipitous the timing was, but that afternoon the First finally put Martok in the combat arena again. Having examined Tain again after ration call, and watched with some reassurance as the Cardassian ate the smuggled mush before drowsing off almost peaceably, Julian was able to go out to stand ringside. The announcement that he was expected had ignited a fresh spark in Martok's piercing eye, but he had not truly allowed himself to anticipate the battle until he was actually in the circle of yellowish lights, preparing for his first opponent. After the way the Second had snatched his last opportunity from him, it had probably been too painful to hope for release today. But when the Twelfth stepped in across from him, Ikat'ika called for the match to begin, Martok leapt into action like a rabid targ who had slipped his leash.

It was a brief and ferocious bout. The Twelfth had clearly not expected such a whirlwind of pent-up wrath and aggression. He was flung to the ground within seconds, bounding up only to meet Martok's hammering fist. The General had insisted that Julian remove the stylus fragment splinting his fifth finger, but he had consented to have it cobandaged against its neighbour again. Julian honestly did not know if it would be enough to prevent another dislocation of the tiny joint. Its cartilage capsule hadn't merely ruptured: it had been shredded. The lengthy respite from the ring, agonizing though it had been to the warrior's spirit, had probably done much to allow the healing process to begin, but that was all it had done: begun. It would take weeks of rest, immobilization, and therapy to restore it to normal stability. That, or ten minutes under Julian's regenerative instruments back on Deep Space Nine.

The prospect of the latter was hazier now than it had been this time yesterday, and that made it painful even to think about. Tain was still breathing, for now, and Julian was grateful for that. But he couldn't hazard a guess when it might be safe for him to resume his work, even with only an estimated ninety minutes of labour left before the message could be sent. It was easier to lay aside that speculation and to focus on the battle before him as Martok swept one talon-toed boot in an arc that should have been impossible with his calcified hip socket, and took the Twelfth's feet clear out from under him. The Jem'Hadar's backside and scapulae slammed into the floor with force enough to wind him: as he struggled to climb the nearest pylon so he could sound the gong, he was gasping for air.

Martok's next series of blows rendered the guard unable to rise again. He tried — Julian suspected that it might have cost him his life  _not_  to try while still conscious — but he could not. Ikat'ika called victory for the Klingon, and Martok shuffled to the edge of the ring where Julian waited. Without needing to be asked, he held out his right hand.

"The joint's holding," Julian said, genuinely but pleasantly surprised. His fingertips skimmed the ruptured skin of Martok's proximal knuckles, satisfied that the slick coating of blood hid only superficial damage. "How's your elbow?"

"Much improved," said Martok, swinging his forearm in a broad, well-controlled circle to demonstrate. "You do fine work, Doctor."

"Most of the work is yours," Julian said, keeping his voice low. The Jem'Hadar were watching intently, although they always seemed curiously respectful of a victorious combatant's space in the interval between rounds. "The physical therapy is paying off. Do you feel better?"

The question had nothing to do with the elbow, but Julian didn't think it was prudent to be more direct. He was conscious of the trust Martok had placed in him last night, and he understood that even between the two of them, discretion was called for. He wanted to convey that he was cognizant of the General's struggles, that he was here to lend support however it was required, and most importantly, that this in no way diminished the esteem in which he held the warrior. Quite the opposite was true, in fact. A man who could press on through the chasm of despair, while the hope he still had to cling to was hovering on the brink of death, was far braver than the man whose certainty never faltered.

When Martok bobbed his shaggy head, broad chest still heaving with the exhilarated exertions of the ring, Julian knew he had phrased his inquiry correctly.

"There is no substitute for battle, Doctor," he hissed through bared, triumphal teeth. "The enemy may come tirelessly until the heavens fall, but while I have strength in my arm and in my heart, I will meet them!" He drew in a deep breath and clapped Julian on the arm, nodding stoutly. "Never did I expect a Starfleet officer to understand such things."

"You'd be surprised," said Julian, thinking of Worf. "Is there any way I can persuade you not to take too many risks in the next bout? I've got my hands full as it is."

Martok laughed, a rumbling, rueful sound that was accompanied by a genuine crinkling of the corner of his good eye. One brief contest of might and wit had restored his confidence, if not in their prospects then at least in himself. "Another day, Doctor," he offered, by way of compromise. "Another day."

 _(fade_ )

It seemed Ikat'ika was not interested in rapid escalation: Martok's next opponent was the Ninth. This battle was longer, and far more brutal. Both opponents took several hard falls and fielded so many blows that they began to blur together in Julian's mind. He tried to keep track of the ones that looked likely to do real damage to either combatant, knowing he could well be called upon to attend to the Jem'Hadar as well as his friend. When Martok executed a series of sharp upper cuts that drove his opponent back almost to the rim of the arena, Julian began to think Martok might gain a second victory. Few prisoners would have had the courage to try such a move on one of the Jem'Hadar: the horned protrusions that lined their jaws made an assault from below both painful and risky. The Ninth didn't seem to be expecting it, and he was briefly disoriented and unable to compensate. But by now everyone knew Martok's weakness, and the Ninth waited for his moment. He took the blows to his chin, and then as soon as Martok shifted to swing both clasped fists like a sledgehammer, the Ninth seized his forearm, dropped one knee, and threw the warrior.

Julian didn't so much hear the  _pop_  as feel it in his bones. He cringed, both in empathy and in resigned consternation. Martok had not even roared in rage and indignation at the pain. He was on his back, clutching his left humerus while his heels scrabbled at the floor. The Ninth swooped down on him, driving a steely fist into the General's face before Ikat'ika called out, sternly but dispassionately; "Enough!"

This was followed by the usual solemn pronouncement of the victor, but Julian wasn't listening. He scrambled over the lip of the ring, hip barking against one of the pylons at just the right angle to sound the gong, and dropped to his knees, actually skidding the last metre and a half to his patient's side. Martok's one functional eyelid was fluttering, and the skin over his cheekbone was torn wide, spilling a dark rivulet of blood. His efforts to arch his body against the pain were disordered now, more instinct than method.

"General," Julian said, his voice low and brisk. "Try to stay still. I know it's painful. Try to stay still."

He reached for the injured arm, the defect in the joint visible even through the heavy layer of the black sleeve, but before he could take any steps to immobilize it, a blazing pain erupted on the crown of Julian's head. He scrabbled to get his feet under him as the Ninth, who had closed a fist in his tangled, overgrown hair, attempted to drag him up by its roots.

"Enough of this!" the Jem'Hadar snarled. Julian was standing now, head twisted to one side to alleviate the intense urgency of the burning in his scalp. The Ninth seemed to sense this, because he twisted his wrist and it reintensified. "Every day you are here, interfering! What is the purpose of defeating prisoner after prisoner, if they are to be coddled afterwards?"

He looked around for approval from his fellows, but out of the corner of one watering eye, Julian could see Ikat'ika's scowling disapproval as he stepped over the lip of the arena. Between them, Martok now lay still, chest heaving. He had managed to tug his arm closer to his side, and was gripping it there while he tried to fight off his daze. Julian was well aware of the armoured thickness of the Klingon skull, and a blow sufficient to daze a hardened warrior had to have been much more forceful than it looked. That, he realized, was probably why the Ninth was now gripping his hair with his non-dominant hand. A blow capable of dazing a Klingon, and of paining the Jem'Hadar who had dealt it — Julian would have loved to know what force that had taken.

That giddy, half-hysterical thought was yanked out of his brain as the Ninth turned his wrist and Julian had to twist his neck painfully to keep from losing a fistful of his scalp.

"Alpha Quadrant species are not like the Jem'Hadar," Ikat'ika proclaimed coldly. "They take their doctors with them, even into battle. He—" Here he pointed at Julian, who could only make out the shadow of the motion through the white burst of light obscuring his vision. "—is a tactical asset for your opponent. It is our duty to learn how to compensate for his interference. Consider: how would you compensate?"

The Ninth bared his teeth. Julian was in no position to see him do this, but the change in the quality of his voice was unmistakable as the soldier said; "I would kill him!"

He yanked Julian's head higher, and his other hand closed like a pincer on the sides of his throat. The grip wasn't calculated to compromise his windpipe. Instead, Julian felt an almost instant hypoxic dizziness as both carotid arteries were compressed just enough to reduce — but not obliterate — bloodflow. Any tighter, and he'd lose consciousness in seconds.

"And if he is in a defensible position, so you cannot reach him?" challenged Ikat'ika.

"I would assault the position, execute his guards, and kill him," said the Ninth belligerently. He shifted his fingers fractionally, and Julian began to lose the broader awareness of his body. All he could feel was the hungry throbbing in his temples and the lingering fire in his scalp. He was vaguely aware that his knees were trembling, and he tried to steady them. He feared what might happen if he allowed them to give out.

"You do not always have the luxury of seeking out ?" Ikat'ika's voice was now coming through a long tunnel stuffed with cotton fluff. "In battle, science and medical personnel are low-priority targets."

The Ninth growled. "Perhaps they should not be!"

"Perhaps," Ikat'ika allowed. "For the purposes of our training, the human is inaccessible. You cannot reach him in order to remove him from the equation. Therefore you must learn to adapt your tactics when the Klingon returns after having been treated. Release him!"

The grip on Julian's neck tightened horrifically, almost lethally, but only for an instant. Then suddenly it was gone, and the other set of fingers were disentangling themselves from his hair in one brisk, snapping motion that tore several slender strands as it went. Julian couldn't keep his feet, but he did at least have the wherewithal to tilt his centre of gravity so that he fell away from Martok instead of atop him. He crashed to his knees, catching himself on the heel of his left palm. His right hand flew instinctively to his throat, as if he could clutch away the pain. He could see nothing, but his other senses were apparently on high alert. He curled protectively inward just as the Ninth's boot blasted into his ribs, and the impact was not what it might have been. Still, it was enough to wind him, and he fought for air and consciousness as the Jem'Hadar strode away.

Julian was groping his way back to his patient's side before almost before his vision cleared. His own parting gift from the Ninth left him fearful for Martok. But the Klingon warrior lay just as he had when Julian was dragged away from him, save that his eye was open again and moving with purpose. It locked with Julian's, and Martok worked his lips in an effort to speak.

"Doctor…" he muttered.

Julian nodded. "Can you stand?" he mumbled. He shifted his weight back so that he was sitting on his ankles, and his left hand was free to rub at his ribs. He didn't think they were more than bruised, and probably not badly at that. He had evaded the worst of it. How had he grown so adept at being knocked about?

"Yes," said Martok, but he did not immediately attempt it. He shifted his grip on his humerus, lips tightening with pain.

Carefully, Julian took control of the General's wrist and guided it across his armoured front, opening up the joint space a little to ease the worst of the grinding misery. Martok shifted his hold from upper arm to lower, cradling it expertly. Julian shuffled on his knees until he was at the warrior's head, and got both hands beneath his shoulders to help him as he sat up.

Most of the Jem'Hadar had dispersed to their posts, and Ikat'ika was gone. Once again, Julian found himself at a loss to divine the First's motivations. He knew he'd been spared injury or worse by the intervention and the forceful thought experiment, but he didn't know why. He had proved useful to Ikat'ika in the past, but surely that usefulness had its limits. And surely there were only so many times the First could take the part of a prisoner, even obliquely, without fomenting rebellion in the ranks. His Second was already discontented, and now the Ninth would be as well — two Jem'Hadar who had been denied their wish to dispatch the troublesome human. That was not a comfortable position for Julian to be in, and no quantity of secret procedures could make him feel safe. Talak'ran had shown that the Jem'Hadar were not bereft of a sense of obligation, but if Ikat'ika felt anything of the sort, Julian had seen no proof. It was just as likely that his intervention this time had been nothing more than a tactical exercise.

It took three attempts to get Martok to his feet, both of them straining and grappling for the right position. When at last he was upright, he swayed unsteadily, and Julian braced his uninjured right elbow with one hand while taking a precautionary hold on his belt with the other. The General glared at him briefly, but did not attempt to shrug him off as they picked their way over the lip of the ring.

The guards were gone, once more at their posts or wherever they disappeared to when not on watch. But a Romulan was leaning on the pillar the warrior and his escort had to pass on their way back to Barracks 6. Julian watched him warily as they approached, a narrow-faced man whom he had interviewed early on in his nutritional study. He made no move to intercept them, and he did not speak until they were almost past.

"Human," he murmured, almost inaudibly. Julian froze, instantly guarded, and Martok's eye slid surreptitiously to the side. The Romulan was very deliberately not making eye contact, and Julian forced himself to look away. Only then did the man continue. "When you have tended to the Klingon, you are wanted by Sub-Commander Darok. He would like to call in his favour. He said you would understand."

Julian did not understand. As he'd understood matters, Darok had consented to allow the Starfleet officer to invoke his name with respect to the study because he had owed  _Julian_  a debt, not the other way 'round. Julian had played along with the subterfuge that had spared the man from injury in the ring. Now they were even, or so he had thought. Could it be he had misunderstood? He didn't like the idea that he might be inadvertently beholden to the influential Romulan. He had debts enough as it was, and they'd brought him nothing but anxiety so far.

Still, he was too cautious to refuse outright. "I'll come when I can," he said quietly. "It may take some time. The General is not my only patient."

"He will wait," said the Romulan. "But not forever. Use your time, but do not squander it."

Julian nodded tightly, but his mouth was dry with apprehension. As he helped Martok into the shelter of the corridor, his heart was hammering in his chest.

 _(fade_ )

He settled Martok on one of the benches, and did a swift assessment of Tain. The Cardassian was awake and feeling his pain, but his pulse had levelled off somewhat and his breathing was not as laboured. He was once more bundled in all of the blankets, at least until curfew, and he made a couple of snide remarks, which was as good an indication as any that he still had some measure of strength left in his failing body. He couldn't be turned out of the barracks, and so Julian could give Martok no privacy for the reduction procedure. The Klingon did not complain, and he did not cry out. They were both too well acquainted with this procedure by now, and the whole thing, start-to-finish took only a few minutes. Then Julian examined the bruise that now formed a shiny ridge across Martok's cheekbone. It was a sizeable hematoma, but there didn't seem to be any deeper damage. It was another triumph for the overengineered Klingon skull.

Julian cleaned and wrapped Martok's knuckles, and inquired after his chest. It seemed the armour had prevented any serious damage there, and he was a little surprised, given that, that the Jem'Hadar still attempted to land body blows when in the ring with the Klingon warrior. At last, there was not much more Julian could do. Tain was dozing again, his breath sawing heavily in the back of his throat. Julian stepped out into the corridor, where Kalenna and Parvok were waiting. They, at least, had offered Martok what space they could.

"Can you watch Tain a little longer?" Julian asked quietly, holding Kalenna back while Parvok ducked back into the barracks. "Sub-Commander Darok wants to see me."

"Does he?" Kalenna said flatly.

Julian frowned. "You don't seem surprised," he said. "Do you have any idea what he wants?"

She looked at him with veiled, inscrutable eyes. "I am not in the Sub-Commander's confidence in every matter," she said. "We interact only rarely. I have not spoken to him since this morning."

Julian wanted very much to press her, but he could tell that wouldn't be welcome. She was trying to tell him something, but he wasn't catching onto it. One thing, at least, was certain: she  _wasn't_  surprised. And he trusted that she wouldn't allow him to walk into an ambush.

"You know where to find me if Tain takes a turn for the worse," he said tiredly. "General Martok… I hope he will decide to lie down, but if he goes out, ask Parvok to shadow him. He shouldn't be unaccompanied. He might be in shock."

She nodded. "As you wish, Doctor," she said. "You had better go. Men like Darok do not like to be kept waiting, and he has already been more than patient."

That wasn't the comforting word of parting Julian had hoped for, but he decided that he would just have to rake up his own courage. He pressed his lips together in what he hoped looked like an expression of determined agreement, and then started for the mouth of the pod. Behind him, Kalenna opened the barracks door and stepped inside.

The walk to Barracks 11 was a quick one, but it still seemed to drag on with noxious imaginings. Julian could not fathom what Darok might want from him, and the effort of trying to keep from speculating was enormous. When he saw the narrow-faced messenger lurking just inside the pod, his unease deepened. And before the door to the cell itself, another Romulan stood, feet planted broadly and arms crossed in defiance. Julian knew a sentry when he saw one, and his stomach churned.

"The Sub-Commander wants to see me?" he said as he approached. The Romulan made a show of looking up and down the corridor to be sure the way was clear. Then he stepped aside and slapped the panel. Julian crossed the threshold.

At once he saw there were only two people in the room. Darok himself stood at the back of the barracks, his posture mimicking that of the man at the door. His expression was one of patrician boredom, and even in the dim light his eyes were brilliantly green. The other person sat facing him, balanced rigidly on the second table with his back to the door. It took Julian a moment to make sense of the triangular lines of the man's armour, and the distinctive contours of his broad neck. He was not a Romulan, but a Cardassian. Julian stepped hurriedly forward so that the door could close, and Darok tilted his head back proudly.

"Ah, Doctor," he said. "I believe you are acquainted with Gul Nador?"

Julian's mouth went dry. "What is this?" he said, although his mind was screaming the answer. It was a trap. Some kind of trap. But how? Why? Had Tain arranged this, so as to have an excuse to carry out his threat? Or had word of the prohibition reached Nador's ears by some roundabout means?

"Doctor!" the Gul said, shifting stiffly so that he could twist his shoulders a little to the right in an attempt to look at Julian. He grimaced as he did so, obviously pained, and Julian found himself hastening further into the room, responding to his patient's need. As he did so, he saw how hopeless it was to respect Enabran Tain's embargo. He couldn't abandon a patient, not any patient, and certainly not for his own selfish reasons.

"Don't turn," he said firmly. "I'm coming. What are you doing in here? How are you feeling?"

"I  _feel_  like I've been trampled by a pack of riding hounds," Nador grunted. "You said the dressings might need to be tightened, but I'm afraid I don't trust any of my men to do it properly. Some would use too little force, for fear of my wrath. Others would use too much, eager to assert power over me. Besides…" He grimaced, shifting his weight again. One hand gripped its proximal knee with white-knuckled force. "I think the bandage is not all that has shifted in the night."

Julian was already loosening the clasps that held the shell of the breastplate together. Nador held his arms away from his body so he could do so with relative ease. "How did you manage with the count?" he asked.

"Well enough," Nador muttered. He hissed with pain as Julian lifted the armour out and over his head, letting it fall to the bench behind. The bands of torn blanket were wrapped around Nador's shirt, so that they could be manipulated without having to get his arms out of his sleeves. Julian found the first knot and began to work it loose. "It was an uncommonly short count. That clever woman… I cannot think she acted for my benefit alone?"

"It's in everyone's best interest if the count is short," said Julian guardedly. "It's an ordeal for all of us."

"Some more than others," said Nador. "But I see you're determined to be circumspect. Fair enough. I expect you to extend me the same courtesy you extend Enabran Tain — though from what I hear, you may have your own reasons to keep our dealings secret."

Julian was instantly on guard, but his hands didn't pause in unwrapping the dressings even though his eyes fixed warily on Nador's. "Who told you that?"

"Our mutual friend, the illustrious Sub-Commander, of course," said Nador, nodding slightly at Darok. "It was he who arranged a… neutral location for us to meet. And it was he who saw to the changing of the guard, so that those who saw me arrive have not seen you, as well as the obverse."

Julian did pause then, because he had to turn to look at Darok. His brows furrowed together. "Why?" he asked. It seemed a little more fruitful than inquiring  _how_  the man had known of this need. "You don't owe me anything; we're even."

Darok regarded him coolly. "True," he said. "I owe you nothing: you have been making capital of my name for the sake of your research, and yet have accomplished no good with the knowledge you've gained. But I do owe the Major, and for much more than opening my door to a Cardassian can repay."

"The Major…" Julian echoed, but he understood. Kalenna. Kalenna had arranged this. She'd know that Julian would have to treat Nador, if Nador needed him. So she'd taken steps to make it less obvious that Julian was doing so. It was an extraordinary kindness, and a brilliant bit of strategy. Julian couldn't say if it would be effective: there were watchful eyes everywhere in this prison, and it was possible word might sstill get back to Tain. But it would have to work much harder to do so. "She's a brilliant operative," he murmured, as he turned back to his patient.

"She is," said Darok. "One of the finest I've served with. I do not think anyone has her full measure, not even her handlers in the Tal Shiar. I certainly do not. But this was a small enough accommodation."

"Not for him, it's not," said Julian. He'd begun to palpate the Gul's ribs as gently as he could, Nador going rigid against the pain, and he'd found the problem. To his patient, he said; "Your sixth transverse rib is out of alingment again. I need to reset it."

"Yes," Nador breathed through set teeth. "Yes, I thought there was a good chance of that."

"We need to lie you down," Julian said, hastening to sweep the armour out of the way. It landed unceremoniously on the floor. "Sub-Commander, will you help me?"

Darok did not respond immediately, and Julian feared for a moment that he was about to say that his part in this matter extended no further than his hospitality. But then he moved to Nador's other side, prepared to take instructions. Together, they helped the Cardassian lie back on the firm support of the table. Then Julian set to work in earnest.

 _(fade_ )

Julian was utterly wrung-out by the time curfew came. He did not have it in him to endure another night without sleep. Neither did he feel comfortable putting the whole breadth of the room, narrow though it was, between himself and his patient. So he laid his thin, lumpy little mattress on the floor by Tain's bed again, and stretched out on it to snatch a few hours' unrestful slumber. He wasn't much the better for it when morning finally came. His whole body ached from lying on the inadequately padded stone, his neck was stiff from sleeping without a pillow, his head throbbed with the afterimage of restless dreams, and he felt frozen to his core. Tain had four of the cell's six blankets: his own, Julian's, Kalenna's, and the Breen's. Martok needed his own almost as urgently as the Cardassian did, because of his physiologically poor cold tolerance. Parvok hadn't offered his, and neither Julian nor Kalenna had been inclined to compel him. He was too often the target for Tain's cruel barbs, and they struck deeper with Parvok than they did with the others.

Or than they  _had_  with the others, anyway. As Julian rolled painfully onto his stomach so that he could push himself up onto hands and knees, feeling bruised and battered and frustrated by his body's inability to sleep through the natural circadian down-regulation of body temperature, he found himself thinking of Tain's words shortly before his collapse. The Cardassian had managed to strike, with a sniper's precision, almost every fear and doubt Julian had about his enhancements, their implications for his true nature, and the probable outcome if the truth ever came out. The latter wasn't surprising: one only had to possess a rudimentary gasp of Federation values and the history of human eugenics to put that together. But the rest of it…

Tain had known that Julian feared more than the legal and professional fallout such a revelation would bring. That would certainly be bleak enough: in the past, Starfleet Medical had been all too ready to display an unequivocal zero tolerance policy towards genetic enhancement and the people it produced. Their one attempt at a more measured response, made during Julian's final semester before his postgraduate residency, had withstood the test of public outcry for only a few days before falling back to their default position. If they had been unwilling to compromise then, with full disclosure from the outset, extraordinary circumstances surrounding the genetic enhancement itself, and the support of the captain and Chief Medical Officer of Starfleet's flagship, what hope was there of leniency in his case? Julian had been born to Federation citizens and raised on Earth. He had lied about his genetic status in order to win a place at the Academy, and he had entered the medical profession under false pretences. Worse, he had done so almost without a second thought, only pausing to doubt himself long after it was too late to step away. The facts were damning, and the only possible outcome if the truth ever came to light was immediate revocation of his medical licence, a dishonourable discharge, and enduring disgrace. There was a possibility that criminal charges would be filed — not only against Richard and Amsha Bashir for seeking illegal enhancements for their son, which was practically a certainty, but against Julian as well. Perjury, fraud, and all the host of crimes that fell under the umbrella of practicing medicine without a licence: criminal negligence, failure to disclose, assault, even manslaughter.

But worse than that was the personal cost. Trusts betrayed, friendships shattered beyond redemption, the loathing and disdain and fear of the people who mattered most in his life. Julian could imagine Captain Sisko's blazing eyes as he called his doctor — his former doctor — to task for five years of brazen lies. He could see the horror on Jadzia's face as it morphed into revulsion. And Miles… Miles, who'd barely been able to stand being in the same room with him when they'd first met, whose friendship Julian had cultivated and earned through tireless effort over slow months, whose gruff affection Julian treasured more than almost any other relationship he'd ever forged in his life. How would Miles respond if he ever realized that he'd befriended a freak? Not just the socially inept, overly talkative person he'd thought he was getting, but a monster out of one of the darkest chapters of human history?

Tain could not know what it had cost Julian to forge these friendships, or how precious they were. Could he? This was a man who cast death threats against the closest people in his life — his once-trusted protégé, his faithful housekeeper — with the same casual ease with which Julian might tease Miles about their latest holosuite adventure, or Jadzia about her taste in romantic partners. Did he have any concept of what it was to need the people around him, not merely for the measurable services they might provide, but for the essence of their being? Perhaps he recalled it out of some distant past before decades of ruthless advancement had built up the callouses on his soul. Perhaps he still held such feelings deep beneath the layers of obfuscation and cruelty.

If the latter were true, did it mean he also retained the fragile thread of empathy and mercy? Was there a hope that his threat might be empty after all? Julian didn't know if he dared to dream of that. Perhaps it was just better to pray that none of Tain's nebulous informants had witnessed the comings and goings in Sub-Commander Darok's barracks. That, at least, seemed plausible instead of hopelessly optimistic.

Thoughts of Garak raised a troubling question. If Tain had been able to uncover the truth, had Garak? It seemed improbable that he would have declined to delve into Julian's background or that, having done so, he'd be any less thorough than his mentor. But if Garak knew, why had he never said anything? Was he, too, saving it for the right moment, to brandish like a weapon to beat Julian into submission? Or had he decided, for the sake of their friendship that had weathered more than a few compromises on Julian's part, to let the truth stay buried? Julian could imagine him doing that, although he knew that most of his other friends would have found the idea preposterous. Garak, for all his faults, was capable of compassion — even of mercy. He chose his moments for each with care, and did not always dispatch them in ways Julian predicted or expected.

Still, it surprised that Garak wouldn't take the opportunity to crow, just a little. He was always needling Julian for being so open and uncomplicated. He was always so pleasantly surprised and impressed when Julian managed to surprise him — when his subconscious had cast the tailor as the villain of his Lethean-induced hallucinations, for instance, or when he had winged Garak with a bullet only to implement his cynical advice a few minutes later. If he knew the truth, and how thoroughly Julian had concealed it from Starfleet, his commanding officer, and almost everyone in his life, why hadn't he said anything? How had he managed to resist?

Tain stirred, and Julian was yanked out of his unsettled reflections. He shuffled nearer to the Cardassian's head, knees dragging against the flattened mattress. His first instinct was to reach for the temporal pulse, but on the off chance this was nothing more than a troubled moment in a dream, he held off. The Cardassian's lips, dry and raw despite the only slight reduction in his water ration today, parted in a noiseless murmur, and the thin sheath of muscle overlying his glabellar teardrop tensed and furrowed. Then he lay still.

Slowly, Julian eased himself back onto his heels, and then slid his legs out from under himself in an attempt to sit more comfortably. He had dozed at his share of bedsides, some more memorable than others. His long vigil watching over Garak as he suffered through the misery of withdrawal from his cranial implant — in anguish so deep that the delta wave inducer could not keep him sedated — stood out starkly. So did the nights spent at Ekoria's bedside as she faced the inexorable deterioration of her once-faithful body under the ravages of the Teplan Blight. In both those cases, Julian's professional commitment had been accompanied by a considerable personal stake. Garak, at the time, had been his friend and lunchtime companion of almost two years, a touchstone in his week and a recurrent source of fascination. Ekoria had given him hope when Julian had teetered as near the bring of despair as his work had ever brought him. His investment in both of their cases had gone far beyond pure medicine.

His investment in Tain's life was different, but no less substantive. In a very measurable way, the lives of everyone in Barracks 6 hinged upon the Cardassian's survival and his return to fitness. Julian might dread what Tain could do to him once they returned to the Alpha Quandrant, but he also knew that without the aged spymaster's skill, they might never return at all. He didn't feel able to bear stretching out on the hard floor with its meagre padding again, so he sat back against the edge of the bench instead, once again settling in to watch and wait. There was no more he could do.

 _(fade_ )


	64. A Supervisory Capacity

_Note: The first chapter of a new story, "Cruel Are the Times" has been posted. Set during Julian's final semester at Starfleet Medical Academy, it deals with the arrival of the genetically enhanced Moab IV colonists on Earth when the_ Enterprise _returns to Sector 001 during TNG 5.19, "The First Duty". This will be a novella or short novel, and it will be updated weekly on Thursdays. I encourage everyone to take a look!_

**Part XI, Act V: A Supervisory Capacity**

Against all odds, Tain stood.

The count was crawling on, Deyos now up to sixty-eight for the third time that morning. Up and down the atrium, prisoners were fighting the urge to shift their weight, to bend and aching leg or roll a weary shoulder or give in to the pull of a giddy head. Julian's own back, done no favours by a second night on the floor, ached bitterly along the low thoracic and high lumbar vertebrae. His throat stung with weariness and his stomach, displeased with yesterday's reduced ration, churned and sloshed disconsolately. It had been too dangerous to try passing the foil packet around so that each inmate could contribute a small portion to Tain; Julian had sacrificed a little more than a third of his own. Now, he could taste the hydrochloric acid in his sinuses, and he found he was no more accustomed to the insidious dizziness now than he had been during his first week in the camp. Even so, he was aware that his patient had eaten less than he had, and he was compelled to wonder how Tain's body could endure this ordeal with so little fuel, atop all the other duress.

He watched carefully out of the corner of his eye. Now and then the Cardassian swayed, or tightened the surreptitious grip he had on the arms on either side — Martok on his left, Julian on his right. He would have to release his hold, as he had yesterday, when the counter drew near; they would have to hope that by the time he reached them, Deyos had tired of his game and made a quick pass. That was a slim hope. Julian was out of his usual place in line for the second morning in a row, and that might draw comment from the Vorta. But someone had to stand at Tain's side, and Martok and Julian were the only real choice. It was a task beyond Parvok's courage, which Julian felt compelled to respect. Kalenna had already drawn the commandant's attention yesterday, and if she was seen to be associated with a faltering prisoner today, Deyos might suspect that the investigation into her possible pregnancy had been a distraction. As for the Breen, Julian thought he could have made them understand what was needed, but he wasn't as confident that he could communicate the risk involved. Asking them to take on a position of danger without knowing whether they could comprehend the possible cost was irresponsible and unethical.

So Julian hoped for the best as Deyos crossed the ring and took up the second half of the count. Martok lowered his arm surreptitiously, reminding Tain that it was time to let go. Julian didn't do likewise, but waited while the Cardassian adjusted to the loss of one crutch rather than snatch away the other.

"If you fall, we'll catch you," Julian murmured, even though he knew that would do no good. If he fell, caught or not, Tain would be beaten. Julian would be as well, for aiding him. It seemed likelier that Martok would launch into a fight rather than submit himself to a pounding, but with his elbow freshly dislocated, he wouldn't last long.

Tain made a low, melodious humming noise somewhere deep in his throat. Julian frowned at the sound, unsure how to interpret it. A stolen glance at his patient's face answered the question. Tain's eyelids were at half mast, quivering subtly. His lips were parted slightly. His broad face was slack with serene pleasure. He was feeling no pain, riding an endorphin high without resistance. Julian feared for what that might mean for his cardiac muscle, but he could not begrudge his patient the relief. He had none of his own to offer, and it was quite likely that without the implant, it would have been impossible for Tain to stand.

Deyos didn't restart the count at a hundred and two, as he so often did. It seemed that without Julian at the end of the line to taunt, there wasn't as much fun in doing so. He drew nearer, drawling the sequential even numbers. Tain swayed, and Julian, arm still straight at his side, reached surreptitiously for the Cardassian's wrist. Tain flicked off his hold and managed, somehow, to counterbalance just a little.

" _There_  you are, Doctor!" Deyos said, even though he was still just approaching Martok and the Romulan in front of him. He didn't bother to count them, or Tain and his partner. He came right for the human. "It's unlike you to cower in the back row. What are you hiding? Step forward. And you: get out of his way."

The man in front of Julian was Karemman, and he fled hurriedly; not to Kalenna's end of the row, which was closer, but to the far terminus of the line, almost at the administration pod. With the way before him clear, Julian did as he had been told. He stepped between the two men in the row ahead, then took not one but three steps away from them. He was trying to put as much distance between himself and Enabran Tain as possible. The Cardsassian disdained that kind of behaviour, and the way Julian had made himself so conspicuous in his short tenure in the camp. But being conspicuous had its advantages at a time like this, when a decoy was needed.

Deyos watched Julian pass him, mildly surprised. Instead of hastening to get in front of him, which might have shown discomfiture or weakness, he began to meander behind him instead, tilting into a tight circle and looking the Starfleet officer up and down as he went. He clicked his tongue thoughtfully as he came around Julian's right shoulder at last, head tilted far to one side. "What are you hiding?" he mused. "Feeling lightheaded? Tired? You're not  _injured_ , are you? I heard you had a run-in with one of the Jem'Hadar yesterday, but I understood no blows were traded."

He thrust out an index finger, prodding Julian aggressively in the breastbone. He moved a little with the motion, but did not fall. Why would he? He was as physically sound as it was possible to be in this place, even if there were dark, bruised fingerprints on his throat and his scalp still felt tender. He didn't respond to the Vorta's questions. They sounded rhetorical anyhow.

Deyos's eyes narrowed. "Why are you hiding in the back row?" he muttered.

Julian had to give an answer, and it certainly could not be the truth. "I'm feeling faint," he said, after a moment's hasty consideration. "Thirty-four hours is too long to go between meals."

"Is that a  _complaint_?" Deyos said silkily, eyes glinting with unsettling eagerness.

"It's a fact," said Julian bluntly. "And when you take your time with the count, it's difficult to stand at attention. You know that, of course. That's why you do it."

He knew the words were far too insolent, and that he was asking for trouble. But if the trouble fell on him instead of his patient, he was willing to court it. Deyos studied him for a moment, contemptuous, then turned to consult his escort.

"The human thinks I take my time with the count," he announced. "Do I, First?"

Ikat'ika regarded him stonily. "Do you desire an answer, Vorta?" he asked.

"I do," said Deyos. "An honest one, if you please. A good leader consults with his men, after all."

"You take your time with the count," said Ikat'ika, so briskly that he almost overran the end of the Vorta's sentence. "It is a simple task, yet you are often distracted from it. You restart often from the beginning, even when the first half of the population has already been counted. It is inefficient."

"Inefficient." Deyos's mouth worked around the word as if it had some exotic and faintly unpleasant flavour. When he turned his pale eyes on Julian again, they were flashing. "Do you think I'm  _inefficient_ , Doctor?" he asked.

"At counting? Yes," said Julian. "At making two hundred exhausted and underfed prisoners suffer needlessly? No. You're very efficient at that. Quite possibly the most efficient person I've ever seen, at least for that job."

Deyos's smile was slow, broad, and terrible. "Yes," he hissed. He was at once pleased, and bristling with malice. "Yes, I am," he said.

He closed his fist on the throat of Julian's jumpsuit. "Step forward, Doctor," he said seductively. "You're so eager to get out of the line? Come a little farther."

He strolled backward, drawing Julian with him until they stood in the very centre of the atrium. The line he'd left was fifteen metres behind him; the other fifteen metres ahead. "Dress up those shoulders, Doctor!" Deyos said crisply. "You're meant to be standing at  _attention_!"

Julian did as he was told, waiting for the order to be given for the Jem'Hadar to set upon him. It didn't come. Deyos walked away from him, back to the head of the line where Kalenna stood watching with studiously unreadable eyes. Julian didn't dare to turn to look at him, but he heard the smile in the Vorta's voice as he said; "Well, dear lady, I've been told the first half of the population has been counted," he said. "So I'll start again with you. "One hundred two. One hundred four. One hundred six."

He moved down the row, three of the Jem'Hadar following him. Ikat'ika remained just at the edge of Julian's peripheral vision, watching him with his rifle at low ready. He must have been given a signal Julian didn't see, because he clearly had his orders. When at last Deyos reached the end of the line — only two hundred one, where once there had been two hundred four — he declaimed the general dismissal. When Julian let the rigidity ebb from his shoulders, Ikat'ika raised the rifle.

"Not you, human," he said. "You stand."

Julian's eyes widened a little. How had Deyos conveyed this wordlessly? Had it been a prearranged plan? "How long?" he asked, before he could weigh the prudence of the question.

Ikat'ika's eyes seemed to glint. "Until you learn discipline," he said stonily.

 _(fade_ )

In the end, he only stood until ration call. It was quite long enough. Four hours, with only those few steps out of the line to break the torturous monotony and the constant strain of standing at attention. Julian was grateful for the drills at the Academy — drills he'd groused about and considered completely unnecessary for a person with his career aspirations — that had at least taught him how to stand properly at attention. It wasn't a restful posture, but he did know how to reduce his chances of syncope. He wasn't sure what would happen if he fainted now. A beating seemed lenient, all things considered. It was entirely possible that the First would simply vaporize him, no matter how useful he'd proved in the past. Ikat'ika had survived years at this posting without the services of a Federation doctor. So had many, perhaps most, of his men. Surely the prospect of doing without once more didn't confound him. So Julian stood, though the ache in his back worsened and his legs and joints began to ache and his head swam.

The other prisoners gave him a wide berth. They didn't abandon the atrium entirely, as they did each evening when the Ketracel White ceremony approached. But they kept to the far ends, carrying out their usual laps to fend off the worst of the cold in tight circles, instead of the usual shambling laps. Julian was aware of them stealing glances at him. He didn't see any of his own cellmates. He hoped that did not mean Tain was in crisis. He'd intended to do a thorough examination when they got back to the barracks, to try to gauge what the strain of the count had cost him, and whether he'd had another cardiac event to prompt the activation of his implant. It was possible it was simply residual pain, or transient angina. But on the other hand…

By the time the klaxon sounded, Julian had stopped thinking about Tain. He'd stopped thinking about anything, in fact, but the armchair in his quarters back on Deep Space Nine. The one with the low, curved back and the seat cushion that was precisely the right depth for his long legs. It was his favourite chair, the one he loved to sink into at the end of a long day, the one he liked to curl up in to indulge in recreational reading — one of Garak's latest recommendations, perhaps, or a book borrowed from Jadzia. She had a collection of real, paper books, and they had the bound-leather fragrance of ancient libraries and daydreams. Julian hadn't had real books at home growing up, and he loved them: the tactile immediacy of holding one, the intimate connection to the words. So much more satisfying than reading on a PADD. He always read more slowly when he had a real book in his hands, and yet he never felt held back. He savoured the words, the scent, the feel of the paper beneath his fingertips. But most of all, just now, he longed to savour the cushioned cradle of his favourite chair. He could almost feel the aches in his weary body melting away in its familiar embrace.

Prisoners were hastening to queue up for their miserable meal, and that reminded Julian of his own hunger. He was urgently thirsty now, too, though that had crept up on him almost unawares. He ran his tongue over lips that were always cracked and sore nowadays. He tried not to let his eyes wander to the line, curling in an unnatural portside direction to avoid him, but they did.

Ikat'ika slung his rifle across his back and jerked his spiked chin at Julian. "You are dismissed, prisoner," he said. "Join the line. And next time, do not defy the Vorta."

He strode away before Julian could rally his wits to speak. That was probably just as well. He didn't know if this, too, was by predetermined order; or if Ikat'ika had decided to take pity on him; or if he was simply bored of the duty. He didn't care.

His first three steps were stiff and stilted, his knees reluctant to bend after so long in the straight-but-not locked configuration required to maintain the formal posture. But moving cleared his head, at least a little, and he picked out his cellmates near the middle of the line. All of them were gathered but Tain, and Kalenna had Julian's canteens in the crook of her arm. She opened up a space for him in the line and passed them off, looking relieved.

"I feared they might not let you join us," she murmured. "I do not think it would be wise for you to miss another meal so soon after the last one."

It had been days now since the lockdown, but Julian didn't argue. "Did you bring…" he whispered, pausing significantly.

She nodded, and he held out his hand for the foil pouch. But Kalenna shook her head. "Today, it is my turn," she said. "You are gracious to offer, but you do not need to bear the burden alone. If we can't share it every day, we can alternate from one to the next."

Julian saw the wisdom in this, and truthfully, he didn't much want to protest. He was ravenous, even more so than usual, and he coveted every mouthful of his mushy, unappetizing meal. There was still water in one of his bottles, and he drained it while he waited for the line to inch its way up to the defunct ore conveyor. He drew his ration with the others, and removed to their usual corner. He ate quickly and anxiously, as he always did, and he licked his plate clean. He remembered a time when he'd believed he couldn't get that desperate. Now, he wondered what he  _wouldn't_  do in exchange for a little extra food. It was no longer a very long list.

 _(fade_ )

Tain was lucid when they got back to the barracks. Kalenna gave him his pocket of grain, and he ate it while Julian poured a small measure from everyone else's bottles to fill the Cardassian's. He was clumsier than usual as he went about this task: standing for so long unmoving in the atrium had yet another adverse effect, and he was half-frozen. His hands ached, and his fingers and toes were numb with the chill. Julian envied Tain the blankets bundled over him, and he tried to work as quickly as possible so he could stop handling the cold metal vessels. When the last one was capped off, he went to his patient.

"I need to examine you," he said. "Are you up for it?"

Tain snorted. "If you must, Doctor," he said. "Ah! But don't go too far, Major. General. I don't need privacy as much as I need expediency. As soon as the good doctor's done with his fussing, I'll need one of you on the door and someone else to help him with the cot. I'm going back in the wall."

Julian stared at him. "You most certainly are not!" he protested sharply, dismayed. "You're in no condition—"

"Yes, yes," said Tain dismissively, flinging aside the blankets and opening the front of his outer shirt. "But tell me this, Doctor. Am I in any condition to recover my former vigour, if you can't get your hands on one of those marvellous Federation medkits? Or spirit me away to that space station of yours for some surgery or other? And what about the General? How many more battles can he survive, before one of the Jem'Hadar rips that arm clean off his body, or worse? You're a shadow of your former self already, and it's only been a little over a month. As for the Romulans…" He wafted a hand to show they were of no consequence, but he still didn't much care for their chances. "There's no time, Doctor, and we've already wasted too much of it. Poke and prod me if you will, but today is the day I get back to work!"

There was no sense in arguing with him. Julian knew that tone of voice and recognized the obdurate set of the jaw. Cardassians ranked among the most stubborn, driven people Julian had ever met. One might as soon ask a mountain to move as ask Gul Dukat to change his mind, and Garak's opinions were so entrenched that trying to bend them was like assailing the walls of an impenetrable fortress. Enabran Tain put them both to shame. Still, Julian felt he had to try. He couldn't talk him out of it, but he might be able to mitigate the madness a little.

"What about tomorrow?" he said. "The transmitter will still be there, and with another day to rest you might have a better chance of doing the work without harming yourself. You had a hard enough time standing for the count, and—"

"And tomorrow's count could be even longer," said Tain dismissively. "Most likely  _will_  be longer, in fact, because you've once again caved to the temptation to tweak the Vorta's nose about his mathematical foibles. Oh, I know why you did it, so you needn't get that injured look in your eye. But the fact is that Deyos does love to make a point to his critics."

This speech left him winded, and he subsisted into quiet wheezing while Julian took his pulse and positioned himself to listen to Tain's heart. The murmur persisted, and the rales in his lungs were louder. He was once more bradycardic, which was not as reassuring as a layperson might have assumed. While it was true that tachycardia like that he'd exhibited on the night of his collapse was more immediately dangerous, no arrhythmia was a good arrhythmia. Julian couldn't treat a slow heartbeat any more readily than he could a fast one, and the constant, gradual strain it placed on Tain's cardiovascular system and organs was a stressor he couldn't really bear. The cold was affecting his respiratory drive, and quite likely aggravating his angina.

In that respect, maybe half an hour in the warm seclusion behind the wall wouldn't be a bad thing.

"All right," Julian said at last, when he had done all he could by way of diagnostics. He sat back on his heels for a moment before climbing to his feet. "If we can get you standing without a dizzy spell, you can go inside the wall for a  _short_  period of time. But at the first sign of chest pain or breathing trouble, we're pulling you out. Agreed?"

Tain started trying to kick off the layers of blankets. He was only entangling himself, so Julian bent to help. No sooner had he finished than Tain clamped a hand on his arm, dragging on him for leverage as he swung into a sitting position. Julian did his best to aid the man, but the exertion still left Tain panting, curled forward over his lap.

They were going to need another pair of hands to help him to his feet, and Julian looked up in search of Parvok. To his surprise, the Romulan man was already near at hand, poised to step in as he had that morning. Julian nodded wordless thanks, and Parvok shrugged one padded shoulder. Martok was in no state to undertake any physical strain at the moment, and they all knew it — but actually  _saying_  it would be a blow to the warrior's spirit. Better to simply step into the breach and take care of such tasks before he could try to volunteer.

By the time he was standing, Tain's chest was heaving raggedly and his grip on the arms of his two aides was deep and bruising. But he did not sway, and his eyes didn't glaze with the activation of his implant. Julian guided him to the open space at the back of the barracks, staying close at hand while Martok took up the lookout post at the door and the two Romulans moved the bunk and removed the wall panels.

"Are you sure you want to try this?" Julian murmured, pitching his voice as low as he could without overtly whispering. "One more day…"

Tain shook his head. "…is one more day wasted," he said. "You may be content to languish here uselessly, Doctor, but I've had my fill. Time for me to get back to work."

"At the first sign of trouble," Julian warned, not feeling the need to elucidate further.

"Yes, yes," Tain said impatiently. Still gripping Julian's arm for support, he steered the doctor towards the hole in the wall before lowering himself slowly and painfully to his knees. Julian dropped into a slow crouch beside him, providing all the anchorage he could. When at last Tain let go, starting forward to crawl into the gap, Julian dropped down to follow.

Tain didn't notice until he had hauled himself upright inside the wall, using the closeness of the chimney-like space for leverage. He looked down in surprise at Julian, head, shoulders, hands and ribs inside the wall, and everything below the waist still out in the main room of the barracks. Tain glowered at him.

"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded.

"I told you," said Julian stubbornly, refusing to let his resolve be undercut by his comical position or the fact that he had to crane his neck just to get a glimpse of the disapproving visage far above him. "At the first sign of trouble, I'm pulling you out. How am I supposed to  _notice_  the first sign of trouble if I'm on the other side of the wall?"

Tain scoffed. "There's no room for two," he said.

"There's room," Julian argued. "I've been in there before, remember? On the day I worked out your little secret? I'll stand at your side. I won't get in the way. But if you insist on working, I'm going to monitor your condition."

"You can wait here," said Tain, indicating the shaft. "I'll call you if I need you."

Julian pushed forward, butting one shoulder against the Cardassian's calf and forcing him to take the first sideways step into the workspace. That enabled Julian to get his knees over the lip of the entrance. Although the small square of floor was still crowded, he shimmied up so that he was standing, wedged between Tain and the walls.

"We're in," he said, for the benefit of Parvok and Kalenna. "You can replace the panels now." They obeyed at once, and the space grew dark. Still, Julian could see Tain's glinting eyes and he knew the Cardassian had no difficulty whatsoever with making out his own features. "This isn't a negotiation," he said. "You're not going to dissuade me. I can be just as pigheaded as you can, and I think you know it."

Tain grunted, broad shoulders heaving with the effort. "Perhaps I do, Doctor," he muttered. "But I won't stand for Federation interference! Not where my work is concerned."

"If you can keep that heart of yours beating steadily, I won't have any reason to interfere," Julian challenged. "Now, are you going to stand here wasting time, are are we going to get in behind the wall?"

As Tain slid himself into the narrow space between the barracks wall and the circuit housings, Julian thought he heard the man chuckle ruefully.

 _(fade_ )

The last time Julian had been inside the wall, the panel had been open to admit at least a slender splotch of light. Now, he had to grope his way through almost perfect blackness. He felt his way after Tain, listening for the Cardassian's breathing and trying to fumble from one slender girder to the next without putting his hand into anything he oughtn't. As he rounded the corner, he could see the glow of the live optronic filaments. A moment later, a dim yellow light filled the space as Tain activated his bundle of five bare cables, their cut ends glowing. The look of satisfaction on the old man's face as he surveyed his workspace was unmistakable. Julian inched a little nearer to him, wanting to be within arm's reach. And he stared in astonishment at the configuration of the circuits before him.

Last time, he'd been startled by the chaotic mishmash of technology and materials. That still remained, but there was now an unmistakable method to the wiring of one particular panel. Hundreds of fine optronic filaments, many only slightly greater in diameter than a human hair, were woven over and around one another in a lattice of interconnected circuits. There were few proper clamps or ports: most of the connections were executed in a series of tiny knots that reminded Julian of nothing so much as the delicate silkwork Garak executed on some of his sartorial creations. He'd never quite seen the correlation between the life of a spy and the skills of a tailor before, but he thought he was glimpsing some of it now. Tain had probably never picked up a strand of embroidery silk in his life, but clearly he possessed an eye for detail and a sophistication of fine-motor dexterity that would easily translate to such work if he so chose.

It was the meticulous work of thousands of hours, and much of it had surely been completed long before Julian ever awoke on this asteroid. The difference was that now, with the modified life support unit wired into the prison's power grid, the optronics were actually illuminated. They didn't glow brightly, as the cables aboard the  _Defiant_  and the station did. They had a sickly phosphorescence, made murky by the ubiquitous layer of greyish dust. But they shed light enough that Julian could appreciate both the intricacy and the scope of the task.

Tain was already at work, splitting a filament with the edge of his thumbnail. He spliced it to another with a quick twist, forming a knot that even Julian's skilled surgeon's hands would have taken more slowly. The end of the second strand he inserted into an almost invisible pinhole in the circuit board. He held it in place with one thumb while the other wedged a sliver of something unidentifiable in to fill the rest of the space. Then he moved on to the next connection.

He worked in silence, and Julian let him. He could see the immense concentration the task required, the constant recalibration of mental calculations he didn't have the knowledge to follow himself. Over a year's diligent, tireless labour had gone into this creation, and the coding of the message itself was only the final step. Though he watched with care, Julian couldn't identify any pattern to the arrangement of the connections. Of course, that was probably part of Tain's grand design. He had composed a coded message, after all, protected by a supposedly unbreakable cypher. It wasn't as if he'd be programming it into the unit using a simple binary or trinary matrix.

As time crawled on, Julian grew increasingly uncomfortable. At first, the warmth of the air had been a welcome, even blessed, change from the bitter chill of orbital night outside. But it was really much warmer than a standard Starfleet room temperature, and the space seemed to grow hotter still as Tain worked. Julian's body was generating heat, of course, and so was the makeshift optronic lamp. The air was stagnant, smelling first of ore dust and mouldering damp but swiftly taking on the pong of body odour: Julian's sour mammalian reek, and Tain's far more pungent smell, salted and fermenting in clothes oily with months upon months of ground-in filth. The combination was sickening. Now and then, the unit would hiss and sputter and let out a random electric shock to protest some alteration Tain had made. Each of these let out a sharp whiff of ozone, which only deepened Julian's nausea.

His back still ached, and although he tried to flatten it against the bulkhead behind him, he didn't have enough lateral leeway to bend his knee so he could brace a foot against the wall as well. That would have taken the curve out of his lumbar spine and given him a chance to stretch out the place where his night on the stone floor had left him sorest. He was settling into a throbbing frontal headache, and he tried to rest his parietal plate against the wall, but that only deepened his nausea. Julian knew that for each one of his discomforts, Tain had to be feeling that and more — well, except for the heat. He seemed to be relishing that, and now and then he'd even cup his palm around the glow of the improvised lamp to feel its warmth. He was perspiring with effort, and his breathing was shallow, but on he worked.

Julian had meant to keep track of how long Tain worked and to call a halt after thirty minutes. But inside the wall, he lost all sense of the passage of time. The Cardassian had said that there was a chronometer function somewhere on the life support unit, but Julian couldn't see it. There certainly wasn't a display screen — that would have been  _far_  too simple.

"I need to check your pulse," he said at last, his voice hoarse with the heat and the dust. He wished he'd thought to bring their water bottles in, but he wasn't about to disrupt the proceedings or risk opening the wall panel just for that. They'd be out of here soon enough, anyway. He didn't like the sound of Tain's slow, sawing respirations.

"Check it, then," grunted Tain. "But if you get in the way of my field of vision, I'll bite your fingers off. This is a very delicate sequence, and if I make a mistake it could short out the entire subroutine. One hundred and six connections so far, Doctor. If you think you hate it when  _Deyos_  starts over at two, you haven't seen me do it."

Paradoxically, Julian actually had to take a shuffling side-step  _away_  from his patient in order to make contact, because there wasn't enough room to raise his arm otherwise — not without bumping the Cardassian's shoulder. He had to look straight into the light as he reached for Tain's brow, squinting to try to maintain clear visualization. Even so, he misjudged the distance slightly, and felt his patient flinch reflexively as he made contact with just a little too much force. Julian landmarked with his thumb and found the artery. He ran his two parallel counts — the passing of the seconds, and the slow, thready beats of the aged man's pulse — and then withdrew his hand. He pressed the back of it to Tain's brow, then his cheek, and finally the back of his neck.

"What are you doing?" the Cardassian demanded irascibly. He didn't pause in his work, nor allow his focus to falter.

"You're clammy," said Julian. "Are you in pain?"

"Find me one prisoner in this place who is not in pain, Doctor," muttered Tain.

Julian felt his stomach clench with dread. The man wasn't even trying to lie. "That's enough," he said. "It's time to take a break. Come on, let's get you out of here."

Tain's voice grew sharp and urgent. "Did you hear what I  _just said_?" he snapped. "I can't stop. Not now."

His hands were moving with concerted precision, unrushed but clearly demanding constant motion. Julian couldn't make sense of what he was doing, but he could hear the telltale  _click_  at the end of each increasingly shallow, ever-more-rapid breath. Tain's lips quivered, now tensing over his teeth, now slackening as if with some deeper tremor. Although it was impossible, in this place that hummed and throbbed with the pulse of the transmitter, Julian fancied he could hear the peripatetic gallop of the Cardassian's overworked heart.

Arguing with a patient who was working up to a cardiac event was counterproductive. It would only elevate Tain's blood pressure, and his organs might not be able to take the additional strain.

"All right," Julian said, as calmly as he could, trying to placate without sounding placating. "Then let me help. Tell me what to do."

Tain scoffed. "By the time I told you what to do, I could have done it a dozen times! Stop nattering, Bashir, and let me work!"

Julian couldn't recall when, if ever, Tain had addressed him by surname alone. Was it a new tactic, a failing of patience, or the sudden abandonment of his game of smooth gentility? The first was certainly  _pro forma_ , and the second would be perfectly understandable. It was the third option that troubled Julian. If Tain lacked the will to maintain his carefully crafted and long-held mask, that did not bode well.

"I'm quicker than the average human," said Julian. "Cleverer. You know that's true; you took great pleasure in holding my future to ransom because of it. Let me  _help_. Just until you're finished the sequence. You don't have time to waste."

"Fine." Tain's hands were still moving with acrobatic slowness, even though his breath now came as quickly as that of a winded sprinter who collapses over the finish line of a race beyond his skill. "By your knee, there's a cable. Not optronic. Electric. With a ribbed rubber insulation sleeve. Careful: the bare end is live."

Julian tried to peer down into the dark near his calves, but there wasn't enough illumination that far down, and the shadowy serpents that dangled in the gloom had precious little by way of contrast.

"Your right knee, Doctor!" Tain snapped. His words were clipped, strained, and ragged with weariness and pain. Not enough pain to trigger his implant, but clearly enough to impact his faculties. "It's just there."

Julian felt blindly in the dark. He found the cable, about as thick as his fifth finger. One end was anchored high above, somewhere in the ductwork. The other dangled at about mid-calf. Julian felt down the length until he was near the live end, got a good grip, and drew it up.

"Good," said Tain. "Now, on my count of three, I need you to take that end, and apply it to my thigh. The back of the thigh, just above my knee. Where the muscle isn't too pronounced. You know the place."

He was trying to describe the distal root of the biceps femoris, but Julian couldn't make sense of the rest of the instructions. "I can't do that," he said. "You'll get a shock. Who knows how much energy is running through this wire? You're grounded, and you've got your back to a tritanum wall. I could electrocute you. At the very least, it'll fry those circuits."

"No, it won't," Tain said patiently, as if talking to an extremely stupid child or a moderately intelligent ox. "On the count of three, I'll pull back my hands and you'll apply the charge."

" _No_!" Julian snapped defiantly. "Absolutely not. You've got conductivity problems in your sinoatrial node. A shock, even a small one, could stop your heart. I don't know what you're thinking, but—"

It happened so fast that neither his genetically enhanced brain nor his immorally augmented reflexes could compensate. Tain's hands left the panel, the right one disappearing somewhere on his far side while the left shot down and under, snatching the cord from Julian's hand. Before the doctor could respond, Tain thrust the cord across his left thigh and into the meat of the right — not down at the base of the biceps femorus, but straight into the meat of the adductor magnus, only a handspan below his groin. There was a crackle of electricity and Tain's body jolted back against the bulkhead. The cord slipped from his hand, swinging like a pendulum. Julian had to press himself against the wall to avoid being struck by it. A pungent smell of singed cloth mingled with the other unpleasant odours in the close space, and for a single, awful instant, Enabran Tain was motionless. Breathless. Utterly silent.

Then he sucked in a heavy gasp, exhaling in a series of ragged little hiccups. He raised his left hand, trembling in the glow of the lamp, and inhaled through his nostrils as it slowly, remarkably, stilled. When he opened his eyes, the nictitating membranes still in place to guard against the dust, Tain's expression was one of distant pleasure.

"Much better," he sighed, and he got back to work.

Julian stared in horror. Tain had just risked electrocution — risked stopping his fragile, already failing heart — just to activate the implant in his postcentral gyrus.

"You're insane," he breathed, unable to say anything more. He felt sick at the thought of what might have happened, at the realization that he was likely only a few amperes from having to drag a corpse out of the wall.

"Well," Tain puffed hoarsely, once more focused on his work. "You're hardly the first person to venture  _that_  opinion."

Several minutes crawled by while Julian tried desperately to rally his wits. There was no arguing with a madman, and Tain had clearly left rationality far behind. Enumerating the ways in which his action had been reckless, senseless, and even borderline suicidal would accomplish nothing. He knew what Tain had been seeking to accomplish, and he'd done it. He was clearly beyond reason.

"You need to stop," Julian finally concluded, his voice flat and heavy. He knew it was pointless. He knew he was defeated. A man who would risk stopping his heart just to numb the pain that was proving a distraction to his work was not going to lay that work aside simply because some Federation upstart  _annoyed him into it_.

"No…" hissed Tain. He didn't so much as glance at Julian. He was splicing another optronic filament with fingers impossibly nimble for their size. "No…" he said again, as he slid the sickly glowing end into place. He snatched up another tiny cable, dangling near the first, and slipped its end in next to the first one. Then he let out a long, exhausted sigh and slumped back against the wall. His shoulders sagged, his hands fell to his sides, and his heavy head tipped forward almost far enough to tangle his hair in the wires. Hastily, Julian thrust a bracing arm across Tain's chest, bearing up some of his weight before he could fall against the wall of fragile connections.

"I don't…" Tain whispered.

"It's all right," Julian said as bracingly as he was able, trying to figure out how he could turn in this narrow space. He needed a better hold on Tain. He needed to help him out of the narrow sarcophagus of a workspace, and back out into the relatively clear air of the barracks. Cold or not, at least there was room to move out there. Room to breathe. He could feel Tain's heart hammering against his triceps as he pinned him to the bulkhead. "We'll get you out of here. You need to rest. You can come back to this another day."

"No, Doctor," Tain said again.

"You can't keep this up," Julian said gently. He knew gentleness was the wrong approach for this patient, but all he felt in this moment was bitter, aching pity and he could not keep it from his voice. "You've done enough for today, Tain. We can try again tomorrow. Or the next day."

Tain shook his head with hypnotic slowness. "You don't understand, Bashir," he mumbled drunkenly, milky eyes lolling to find the younger man's face. He could hardly muster the strength to force the words past his disobedient lips. "It's over. I've done it. The transmission has been sent."

 _(fade to black_ )


	65. Teaser: Hindsight

_Note: The dialogue from Quark's entrance to Miles's "Me, too." is taken from the script for 5.13, "For the Uniform", written by Peter Allan Fields. I made a couple of small changes to syntax that I believe the actors, particularly the incomparable Armin Shimerman, would have chosen. The scene did not make it into the final cut of the episode; whether for time constraints or because it was just a little_ too _on-point, I cannot say. That is in many ways a pity… but it does give me some great material here! Someone's arrogance is definitely running away with them._

** Part XII, Teaser: Hindsight **

The Defiant was a mess. One cascade virus planted in a single subroutine who-knew-how-many months ago had successfully compromised every memory circuit in the databanks, reducing Starfleet's sophisticated warship into a hulk of scrap metal and useless equipment, and its highly trained crew into an aimless team almost as adrift as a bevy of blind-drunk Packleds. As Miles O'Brien planted his heel and slid out from under the primary warp field console in Engineering, he found he was still burning with the humiliation of standing idly by while his ship — the one he'd held together with modified dampening fields and good old-fashioned Leinster obstinacy, until he'd found a way to stabilize its overpowered engines — was towed back to the station by the  _U.S.S. Malinche_. There weren't many situations more uncomfortable for a conscientious engineer.

Miles still hadn't worked out how Eddington had managed to disguise his virus so it hadn't been detected in all the meticulous maintenance sweeps and the routine upgrades performed since the man had burned his bridges and run off to join the Maquis. Only he hadn't run off to  _join_  them: he'd been a sympathizer almost the whole time he'd served aboard Deep Space Nine. The theft of the industrial replicators bound for Cardassian worlds had merely been Eddington's way of showing his true colours. And before he had gone, he'd planted the viruses: one onboard the  _Defiant_ , and at least two on the station itself. The latter, at least, he hadn't activated: Odo had found and removed them after the  _Defiant's_  inglorious return. While it was easier to find something you were looking for, Miles couldn't quite move past the anger and frustration that sprang from his failure to have noticed the viruses months ago. He was taking the sabotaging of his ship very personally, but that was all right. Worf was doing the same, storming around on the Bridge and overseeing the work up there with the same wrathful determination Miles himself was feeling. And that was to say nothing of Captain Sisko.

Miles rocked into an abdominal crunch, sitting up with his ankles crossed and his knees bent, arms dangling across them. He rolled his back into a hunch, tucking his head and trying to stretch his neck. He'd assigned teams 'round the clock: no one with an ounce of engineering experience was going to have a day off for the next couple of weeks, and he himself had been pulling double shifts. The pursuit of Eddington had brought an abrupt end to the period of light duty Miles had requested instead of official paternity leave, and now he'd be lucky if he got to spend more than a few minutes at a time with Keiko and the kids until the  _Defiant_  was operational again.

He'd left his quarters shortly before 0330, giving Keiko a quick kiss and leaning briefly over the bassinet to treasure a glimpse of his baby son. Kirayoshi was the most perfect little boy imaginable, not only beautiful but remarkably obliging for a newborn. Miles had to wonder if they owed that in part to the peaceful Bajoran birthing process that had brought his son into the world. He had missed Molly's birth, but Keiko had told him that although it had been many wonderful things — miraculous, fulfilling, exhilarating — it certainly had  _not_  been serene. Worf certainly seemed to agree with that sentiment: he had never been willing to discuss his experience as Keiko's birthing coach, and Miles knew better than to push for information. The Klingon's defensive consternation to the announcement of this pregnancy had been eloquent enough.

Miles scrubbed his face and raked his hands up into his curls before looking dazedly around at the ruins of his ordinarily pristine Engineering. Toolkits and replacement parts were piled on every available surface, balanced on the railings, laid out on the stairs. Optronic cabling and new EPS conduits were laid out on the floor. Almost every panel had been pried off the walls to allow access to the fried optronic circuitry behind. Some of the restoration work was a matter of programming: Dax and her team were hard at work on that, and the other department heads were going to have to upload their relevant databases. But a lot of the damage was physical, too. The virus had caused overloads throughout the computer's infrastructure. Circuit diodes were burned out, numerous micropower relays had failed, and portions of the communications, weapons, and navigations systems were literally fried, their EPS conduits having shorted out so violently that there were scorch-marks in the bulkheads. The tactical systems were ravaged, the transporters were completely useless, and Miles honestly wasn't sure if he'd be able to salvage the cloaking device. And Eddington hadn't stopped at pulling the  _Defiant's_  teeth. All the "soft" systems that made the spartan warship habitable were offline: replicators, sonic showers, the music library, and even the reading lamps in the bunks. The first priority had been to restore power to at least two toilets per deck, so that the repair crews didn't lose time running out to the Docking Ring whenever they needed to relieve themselves.

As far as Miles could tell, only two things on the entire ship had been unaffected by the cascade virus. In an act of humane consideration that surprised Miles, given the man's ruthlessness in other respects, Eddington had programmed the virus to spare the life support system. Air exchange, temperature and humidity controls, and the artificial gravity net were unscathed. The only other untouched system was the brand new holo-communicator, which Miles had installed while the  _Defiant_ orbited Marva IV. It had its own circuitry, and an entirely new computer subroutine. Eddington, working more than eight months ago to lay his plans as carefully as a spider, hadn't been able to anticipate it's arrival, so he hadn't been able to arrange for its sabotage.

He got to his feet, surprised by the amount of effort it took. He was more tired than he'd thought. He hadn't slept at all on the way back to Deep Space Nine, and he'd launched right into repairs upon his return. Working double shifts wasn't such a burden in the ordinary way of things: the station had been on a four-shift rotation for a while now, so a normal double was only thirteen hours. But in order to hasten the repairs to the  _Defiant_ , Miles had switched back to a three-shift rotation, which allowed more of his team to be on duty at any one time. That meant, however, that a shift was eight hours and forty minutes, instead of six and a half. On a double, which Miles hadn't yet inflicted on any of his crew but really didn't see any way to avoid himself, his time out of his quarters, from the moment he left the front door to the moment he crossed the threshold back again, was just shy of eighteen hours. That was assuming he didn't need to make any side trips to collect equipment, deal with an urgent maintenance issue on the station itself, or haul his weary bones up to Ops for a briefing like the one he'd given Sisko the other day.

Nor could he simply fall into bed when he got home, however much a part of him might want to. Keiko needed time for herself after caring for the kids all day. She never complained when Miles couldn't do his share, and there was no denying that she had always been the primary caregiver for Molly, and now for Yoshi. She loved their children with all of her abundant heart, but that didn't mean that caring for them alone wasn't hard on her. Miles couldn't possibly take a fair portion of the feedings and diaperings and soothing rounds of the living room, gently jiggling their new precious little cargo; not when he was out of their quarters for eighteen hours at a time. But at least he could give Yoshi a bottle and cuddle him for half an hour while Keiko had a bath and did some reading, and if he happened to be home at the same time Molly was, assuming she was awake, he could field some of the seven-year-old exuberance, too. But the truth was, it was exhausting, and it might have been a mistake not to just take a few weeks' paternity leave like Captain Sisko had suggested.

Miles chuckled at the thought. It wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference. If he'd taken the leave, he wouldn't have gone to the edge of the Badlands with the  _Defiant_ , but he'd still be glued to its deckplates now. There was no way he'd have been able to enjoy the time at home, while his ship — his proud, agile, ferocious, unconquerable little ship — lay in ruins on the Docking Ring. He walked over to the tactical controls, where Abdon was on hand and knees, trying to make an adjustment to the EPS conduit. It fizzled as he applied the hyperspanner, and he grimaced.

"Need a hand?" O'Brien asked.

The bald, ridged head rocked from side to side. "I've got it, Chief. At least I think I've got it. Who would've guessed a  _virus_  could do so much damage?"

"Tell me about it," Miles muttered, moving on to the next station. Duarte and Pechetti were trying to recalibrate the aft phaser banks, without much success. There was interference somewhere on down the power grid. After poking around the console for a minute or so, Miles shook his head. "You're going to have to get into the Jefferies tubes and track down the problem," he said. "But not right now: it's almost time for lunch." He looked around at the tools and spare parts and metres of burned-out optronics strewn over the floor. "Take a few minutes and try to clear a path across the room, would you?"

"You bet, Chief," said Pechetti, looking relieved at the reprieve. Miles felt a twinge of remorse. He might be driving his people too hard, caught up in the Captain's intention — unspoken but clearly implied — to resume the hunt for Eddington as soon as possible, and his own deep-seated need to get his vessel in order as soon as bloody well possible. But on the other hand, they couldn't risk having the  _Defiant_  out of commission for long. The Maquis were only part of that. Tensions with the Klingons persisted, despite the ceasefire, and there was always the risk of trouble with the Dominion. The station was hardly defenceless, with all the recent upgrades, but it certainly wasn't manoeuvrable. They needed the warship operational.

He moved on in his circuit around the room, checking in with his people as he went. Here and there he offered a suggestion or an instruction or some guidance, but for the most part everyone was getting along well on their own. It was the sheer volume of tasks, rather than the complexity of the repairs, that was the biggest obstacle here. Miles had never paused to consider how many isolinear chips there were in one little circuitboard, until he had to replace every damned one of them, on every damned board, in the whole damned ship!

He was just moving on to the upper level when three colourfully-clad figures came striding through the doors to Main Engineering. The doors — like everything else — weren't functional, so they'd been forced open by hand and were now being held that way by a couple of cargo containers. Quark ushered in two waiters: a Bolian and a Bajoran, because Ferengi were forbidden from working for him now that he didn't have an FCA business licence. They were carrying a large refrigeration chest between them, Quark's insignia proudly stencilled on every side.

"Lunchtime!" the bartender proclaimed proudly.

Eager heads snapped up from watching busy hands, and several crewmen popped out from under consoles. Stevens, who had been working in the Jefferies junction just behind the warp core, slid one leg out into the room, looking hopeful. Nobody moved, however, while they waited for for their Chief's permission to stop.

Miles grinned wryly and waved a hand, indicating they should line up. Quark had directed his waiters to lay down the chest on the stairs, and they were unpacking sandwiches and bottles of chilled beverages — non-alcoholic, of course. As the engineering crew laid aside their tools and hastened to queue up, the waiters began to list the various options.

Quark watched all of this for a moment, satisfaction turning to smugness as he pulled out one of his oddly-shaped Ferengi PADDs and waggled it midair. "Who's doing the honours?" he asked.

Miles let out a rueful little chuckle, stepping back down into the pit around the warp core. "I'll do it," he said, with a suitably long-suffering air.

Having Quark cater a shift meal was unusual, but clearly the best option in this situation. The replicators were one of the lowest-priority systems on the ship, and they were going to require a lot of meticulous attention before they were even safe to use, let alone functioning at the level they had been just before Eddington had his way with the computer. It had taken Miles the better part of a year to get the  _Defiant_ ' _s_ replicators up to speck when they first got the ship. He wasn't looking forward to starting from scratch. But the crew had to be fed, and asking people to work a three-shift rotation on combat rations wasn't good for morale. Miles had been negotiating with Odo, trying to figure out if he could spare some deputies to take care of replicating and hauling meals out to the ship, when Captain Sisko had suggested this might be an opportunity for Quark to make a contribution.

_Your people are going to be putting in a lot of hard work in the next few days, Chief. Starfleet can afford to shell out for decent meals. Tell Quark you want the good stuff: nothing replicated. If we have to cancel everyone's time off, the least we can do is make sure they're well fed._

That was just like the Captain, who could always be relied upon to consider the ways food might be used to bolster people's spirits and make them feel appreciated. And  _Quark_  certainly hadn't complained. As he handed off the billing PADD now, he looked positively gleeful. It was a nice boost to his daily business.

"Just put your thumbprint right there," he said suavely, as if Miles didn't know how the device worked.

That was just a tad suspicious, actually: Miles was a regular at Quark's, constantly charging drinks or meals or holosuite time to his Starfleet leisure stipend account. Rather than approve the invoice at once, he started to read it. Once bitten, twice shy, after all.

Quark looked wounded. "What? You don't trust me?" he asked.

Miles snorted. "Starfleet Accounting has been all over me for these bills of yours," he said. "Apparently, two weeks ago I ordered six cases of champagne for the night shift."

He'd had a heck of a time justifying that one. In the end, it had just seemed easier to imply it had been in celebration of the upcoming birth of his son, a little token of appreciation for the staff who had to pick up the slack while their Chief was on light duty. The alternative would have been trying to explain how he'd let a Ferengi bartender hoodwink him in the first place. He  _had_  put his thumb on the PADD, after all, and really should never have done so without reading it first.

Quark didn't  _quite_  bat his eyelashes in innocence, but he was all wide-eyed credulity as he asked smoothly, "Can I help it if you care about your crew?"

There was some truth in that, because Miles  _did_  care about his crew a great deal. The Starfleet staff who were working 'round the clock to restore the  _Defiant_ , and the Bajoran Militia staff who were picking up the extra slack required to keep the station running smoothly in the meantime. Quark's own brother was running the swing shift right now, a considerable leap in responsibility for Rom but one that Miles was confident he could take on.

He studied the invoice. Assorted sandwiches and drinks for thirty-two, which was a bit on the generous side when there were twenty-five crewmen on shift — plus Miles and Worf — but it allowed everyone to have a choice of food, and an option of a second helping for people like Ensign Gror, who was a Tellarite and required twice as many daily calories as his human crewmates. There was a special line item for Technician Darnax, whose species couldn't metabolize carbohydrates; she required a unique meal. A delivery surcharge, which was irritating in principle but not exorbitant in fact. And a fee to defray the cost of refrigeration, which Miles felt stretched the bounds of good taste, all things considered, but wasn't overtly objectionable. And then way down at the bottom of the list, after the breakdown of sandwiches by variety, was a charge for three kegs of Yridian ale.

" _Quark…_ " Miles groaned warningly, fixing the Ferengi with a blistering glare. Before he could point out the problem, the PADD was plucked from his fingers.

"All right, all right, if you're going to get  _picky_ …" Quark muttered, jabbing at the controls as he adjusted the invoice.

Miles looked up at the line. Word had obviously spread through the ship: the team from the Bridge was here now, everyone but Worf. He probably  _would_ be working on combat rations, preferring to work through the break uninterrupted. Miles hadn't really sounded out his friend about how he felt about this violation of his ship. He hadn't really had the courage to raise the question, honestly. Worf was a good man, and their friendship went way back to the early days on the  _Enterprise_. But he had a Klingon temper, and right now he was probably livid.

Miles left Quark to his creative accounting, and stepped into place at the back of the line. Several of his crew already had their food, and they were settling on the stairs or the railings or the equipment chests to eat. Everyone was tired and frustrated, but just now they were smiling and joking and swapping garnishes like a bunch of schoolkids. The novelty of the catered meal was a welcome break in a hard shift.  _Looks like Captain Sisko was right_ , Miles thought.  _Well worth the expense_.

His eyes were drawn to the main doors as another person entered. Miles turned, expecting to see Worf after all, and was surprised to find it was Julian Bashir instead. He hadn't known the Doctor was on the ship, although he had just as much work to do as any other department head, reloading every subroutine, application, database, and memory file from scratch. But it was good to see him, and wasn't it just like the intrepid Doctor Bashir to turn up just in time for lunch?

"How's it going, Julian?" Miles asked as Bashir stepped into line behind him.

His friend rolled his eyes. "Wonderful," he said, positively dripping sarcasm. "I've reloaded two percent of the medical database into the computer. At this rate, working 'round the clock, I should be done… oh, a year from Thursday?"

Miles cringed. Two percent in as many days? His own crews had, by his estimate, restored  _twelve_  percent of overall functionality, with the most critical systems at least twice as far along. "I still can't believe how much damage Eddington managed to do," he muttered. Why had the man gone after the Sickbay memory banks, anyway? That was just spiteful.

Bashir was watching the irregular swirl and flicker of the warp core, which usually pulsed with the steady rhythm of an antimatter heartbeat. He seemed to be projecting all of his bitterness about the situation onto the chaotic blue maelstrom: he was glaring at it as if it was a moral affront to his person. He curled his lip and deliberately looked away from it, fixing his gaze on Miles's eyes as if he'd only just remembered he was not alone.

Julian blinked twice and said, blandly; "I never trusted him, you know."

Miles snorted. Just like Julian, to try to claim prescience in hindsight. It was obnoxious, but also strangely endearing. "Oh, come off it!" he scoffed.

His friend shook his head gravely. "No, I'm serious," he said, looking straight into O'Brien's eyes. "Right from the beginning, there was something… slightly  _off_  about him."

The skin on the back of Miles's neck was crawling. It was an uncomfortable sensation, the sudden haunted unease, and he forced himself to ignore it. He wasn't going to give Michael Eddington that kind of power over him, damn it! The man was a traitor and a bastard and a damned fool for picking a fight with Benjamin Sisko, but he wasn't superhuman. Miles distracted himself from his discomfort by looking incredulously at Julian. "What are you talking about?" he scoffed. "You were always inviting him to play darts with us!"

Actually, he could only recall Julian doing so on two occasions, and to be fair, between the two of them they'd invited just about every station resident with opposable thumbs to give the game a try. It had taken some doing to encourage (well, compel) the pastime to catch on.

"I was trying to be polite," Julian said, a little defensive. It was almost as if he hadn't even remembered he had done that. "I never really liked him," he added, for good measure. Then his eyes took on a subtly sly look as he added; "Besides, you're the one that had him over for dinner to your home — with your wife and child."

The line had moved up, and Miles was at the head of it now. He fished into the chest for a sandwich and a bottle without looking at either, and backed out of the way so that Julian could have his choice.

"It was a dinner party!" he protested defensively. "There were twelve other people there. I didn't like Eddington — I invited him because I thought he was  _your_  friend."

Julian finally settled on a sandwich from the small selection left, and grabbed a bottle of icoberry juice almost without a glance. He led the way to the nearest vacant cargo box, and nudged it with his boot so that it was perfectly parallel to the engine console. When he sat down, he put his back squarely to the flickering warp core.

"That's ridiculous," he said, setting the bottle by his boot and stretching out his long legs before him. "He was never my friend. Okay, he played a great game of darts… and he knew how to tell a good story."

Miles had his own makeshift seat in place now, and he sank down on it with a nostalgic chuckle. The uncomfortable knowledge that he'd allowed a double agent, a sleeper terrorist, into his home — to dine at his table and talk to his daughter — was losing some of its edge. Eddington  _hadn't_  hurt Molly. So far as Miles knew, he'd never had any intention of doing so. Sure, it was a bit creepy to know he  _could have_ , but he hadn't.

And Julian, as usual, had found a way to get him smiling. He felt a grin rise to his lips. "Remember the one about the four-legged Talorian?" he asked, trailing off a little to hand off the punchline.

"And the Orion slave girl!" Julian chuckled, as Miles had known he would. Eddington had regaled the entire mess hall with that one once, everyone but Odo almost breathless with laughter by the end.

Miles cracked open the clamshell that held his sandwich, and Julian mirrored him. But then silence descended, and Miles found himself staring down at the food. Bashir had taken an Altair sandwich. He himself had egg salad, apparently; not a particular favourite, but that served him right for not paying attention. He looked at it, thinking of Eddington's wry wit and what they had all believed to be his undying devotion to duty. He remembered the way he had beamed with pride at Captain Sisko's promotion ceremony. How apologetic he'd been when five of the senior staff had materialized in the  _Defiant's_  transporter room to find it looking… well, a heck of a lot like it did right now, actually: torn apart and in absolute chaos. How he'd clapped Miles on the shoulder in earnest congratulations when he'd heard Keiko was pregnant.

Julian sighed tiredly, and O'Brien looked up at him. "You know what, Miles?" the Doctor said, subdued. "I guess I  _did_  like him."

"Me, too," Miles said heavily.

There didn't seem to be much else to say about it. They could have gone on, of course. Could have talked about the feelings of betrayal, or the nausea that came from knowing you'd trusted someone, liked someone, cared about someone who hadn't earnestly given a damn about you the whole time. But what was the point? It wouldn't make either of them feel any better about it. The events of the last few days had brought back the sting of betrayal, and they were just going to have to wait for it to subside like it had last time. And maybe, just maybe, get the  _Defiant_  back in service in time to do something about the slick operator and all his Maquis friends.

Miles fished down the side of the container to get a hold of his sandwich. He picked it up and wrinkled his nose. "Egg salad," he said sourly. "Never much cared for egg salad."

Julian had one half of his midway to his mouth, and he stopped. "Want to trade?" he asked.

Miles raised his eyebrows. "You'd do that?" he asked. He'd been expecting some good-natured teasing, or a mildly exasperated reminder that he could just walk over to the chest and pick himself something else if he wanted to.

"Of course," said Julian. He put his sandwich back into its case, and held it out.

"Huh. Thanks!" Miles said. He extended his own and, like a pair of boys on the playground, they swapped lunches. He grinned down at the Altair sandwich. "This is my favourite," he said, lifting the top piece of bread to confirm what he'd hoped: Quark, knowing his preferences just as well as Julian did, had made the Altair sandwiches without mustard. He hadn't forgotten those who might want the condiment, either: on the upper level, Peschetti and Gordon were handing off a bottle of the stuff. You had to keep an eye on Quark's billing practices, but his consideration of his customers' gastronomical needs was exemplary.

Julian only nodded: he was chewing pensively on a mouthful of egg salad. When he had swallowed, he said; "I haven't had the chance to say what a good time I had at the party for Kirayoshi. Will you thank Keiko for me?"

"Sure," said Miles. He nodded at the mess around them. Only half joking, he added; "Next time I see her. Which could be around the time Yoshi starts crawling."

"Oh, surely it's not  _that_  bad," said Julian bracingly. "I've got faith in you, Miles: you'll have the  _Defiant_  ship-shape and Bristol fashion in no time. Really, though, it was a good party. I'll remember it 'til the day I die, won't you?"

Miles looked at him quizzically. That was a hell of a thing to say. "I suppose so," he said uncomfortably. "I mean, my son's birth, and all…"

Julian nodded sagely. "Molly's quite the little hostess," he added.

"Yeah," Miles agreed fondly. The peculiar question was forgotten as he remembered his daughter, bursting with sisterly pride, solemnly parading every guest past Keiko and the baby. "At least there were no Maquis spies at  _that_  party."

"That you know of," said Julian, chuckling. He balanced the sandwich container on his lap and opened the bottle of icoberry juice. "Cheers!"

Miles picked up his own bottle, looking to see what he'd chosen. Trixian bubble-juice, apparently. Oh, well: could be worse. "Cheers," he said. Then he sighed. "Hell of a time to be stuck working eighteen hour shifts. It's not really fair on Keiko."

"Kira said she's going to stop in for a few hours today to give her a break," said Julian, setting aside the beverage. There was a faint purple stain at the centre of his lower lip where the icoberry juice had lapped against it. He picked up the half-eaten segment of sandwich again. "She seems to have bonded with the baby."

"Well, that's hardly surprising," said Miles. "She carried him for almost seven months. She's moved back to her old quarters, did I tell you? Place seems kind of empty without her."

"It was never meant to be a permanent arrangement, Miles," said Julian, almost boredly. "Besides, I'd have thought with a newborn 'round the place nobody has time to feel lonely."

"I didn't say I was  _lonely_ ," Miles hedged. The fact was he wasn't quite sure how he felt about Nerys moving out. It had always been the plan, but it still seemed to have left a hole in the middle of the family. "It's just… an adjustment, that's all." He glared at his friend, daring him to take the matter further.

Julian didn't. He shrugged one shoulder. "Whatever you say," he remarked placidly.

Miles blinked at him, not so much surprised by the amiable refusal to needle him as he was by Julian's lower lip. The icoberry stain was gone. Usually those lingered: when Molly had an icoberry popsicle, she spent the next two days looking like she was wearing extremely dark lipstick.

"Did you just…" Miles began, looking around and confirming what he already knew: neither of them had thought to grab a napkin. Had Julian wiped his mouth on his sleeve? But icoberry stains didn't usually just wipe off.

"Did I what?" Julian asked mildly, looking up from his food.

Maybe it had just been a trick of the light in the first place. The warp core  _was_  strobing like a bad hologram. But Miles could have  _sworn_  he had seen a dark, purplish crescent on his friend's lower lip.

"Never mind," he sighed. "I'm just tired. No rest for the wicked. Did you hear that?" he asked more generally, raising his voice so that everyone in the engine room could hear him. "I said no rest for the wicked. Five more minutes, then we all get back to work!"

There were a few half-hearted groans and grumbles, and one or two crisp replies of; "Yes, Chief!" Mostly, though, everyone just focused a little more intently on finishing their food.

A low chuckle at his shoulder drew O'Brien's attention upward. Quark stood over him, grinning. "And I thought  _I_  was a tough boss, Chief," he said. "You keep 'em on your toes, that's what I say."

Miles's eyes narrowed. "There something I can do for you, Quark?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, there is!" Quark said with the uncharacteristic warmth that always meant there was profit in the wind. He held out the Ferengi PADD. "I didn't like to interrupt your conversation, but I  _do_  still need that thumbprint."

With a roll of his eyes that was equal parts exasperation and playfulness, Miles took the device and did another quick survey of the invoice. The objectionable charge was gone, and none of the others had been altered. "Looks good," he said, and planted his thumb on the scanner. The PADD chirped eagerly as his print was accepted, and he handed it back. "I can expect you at 2100 for the next shift's meal break?" he asked. "Lieutenant Bilecki will be in charge, and she knows to keep an eye on what she's signing, so no funny business. Understood?"

"Wouldn't dream of it, Chief," Quark said, looking affronted at the very idea. He smiled toothily at Bashir. "And how are you today, Doctor?"

"Just fine," Julian said, getting to his feet with a rather melodramatic sigh. "But I've got to get back to work. No time to waste: I've only got another few million files to reinstall."

Miles grunted appreciably at that. "Good luck," he said ruefully. As his friend moved off, he crammed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and started getting himself back into a working frame of mind. Julian was right, as usual: there  _was_  no time to waste.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	66. Desperate Times

_Note: Not for the first time, Julian quotes A.A. Milne, this time from "Winnie-the-Pooh" (1926). What can I say? He was a good little British boy, once upon a time._

_Also, bonus points for spotting the organic insertion of a Julian-centric episode title in this chapter. Couldn't resist._

**Part XII, Act I: Desperate Times**

Julian had no time to celebrate, or even to really process what Tain had said. It took all of his energy and most of his faculties to extricate the aged Cardassian from the wall. It was impossible to support Tain as he needed to be supported while they were still beside the life support unit — or rather, the now-functional transmitter. Julian did the best he could, but Tain's knees were trembling, and he was fighting for breath. They inched along, Julian trying to maintain a supportive hold across Tain's broad back with one arm, while drawing him sideways with the other. The closeness and the heat were more suffocating now, with the urgency of the need to get out weighing upon Julian's psyche. He had to force back the tide of mounting anxiety, telling himself fiercely that his patient could not afford it. He had to keep his wits about him, and get them both out of this wall.

Finally, they reached the turn, and Julian knocked on the wall panel. He heard the whisper of hasty motion on the other side, and after a moment Kalenna said; "Clear." Then the smaller panel was pried away, and a shaft of light illuminated the narrow chamber.

Julian didn't wait for Parvok's arm to appear: he twisted o the spot again so that he could get a glimpse of Tain's face before the light was obscured again. The Cardassian's lips were bloodless, parted slightly with the effort of drawing breath. His eyes, still shaded by their secondary lids, were glazed and distant. Despite the obvious strain on his heart and lungs, he looked drunkenly contented.

"I never thought I'd condone the creation of that implant," Julian muttered. Tain didn't seem to have heard him. More forcefully, so as to be heard over the  _thump_  of Parvok's fist on the inside of the exit pane, he asked; "Can you get down onto your knees?"

"I'm not deaf," Tain groused, but he moved his hand from its death-grip on Julian's forearm to clamp a vise on his shoulder. Julian got his own hands into Tain's armpits, preparing to support him as he eased down.

There was almost no room to work: there really wasn't enough space for both of them even standing, much less on hands and knees. Julian managed to get three-quarters of the way into a deep squat before he ran out of space: he had to lower Tain the rest of the way by dropping his arms. The strain on his biceps and extensor carpi muscles was intense, but mercifully brief. The artificial gravity net was on their side, and a moment later Tain was kneeling with one hand planted on the floor, head bowed over almost against Julian's awkwardly angled thigh.

He couldn't stand up again without kneeing his patient in the nose, and even if he had been able to, what good would it have done? The small of Julian's back was pressed right against the bulkhead girders, and if he turned around he'd find his front pinned against them instead. For an awful instant, he thought he'd gotten the both of them into an impossible position. The giddy, half-panicked thought rose to his mind that perhaps it was time to ask Martok to tell them a heartening story.  _Would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in a Great Tightness?_

Julian didn't realize he had snickered until he heard Parvok's anxious whisper, somewhere in the neighbourhood of his right kidney. "Doctor? Is something wrong?"

 _Yes,_ thought Julian;  _there's something wrong. I've gone and got the both of us stuck, and Tain's probably having another heart attack._ But there was nothing to be gained in saying that, and anyhow, he thought he had an idea. It wasn't exactly the sort of scenario that Starfleet Academy used to test applicants' spatial orientation, but it definitely called for the same skill set.

"Nothing's wrong," he said, not so much a lie as an extremely targeted truth. "Just step back and give us plenty of room."

He heard Parvok retreat. The backs of his thighs and the knots of his calves were already burning with the unnaturalness of his position — something that would have been absurd to contemplate in the days before chronic dehydration had become a way of life. Muscle cramps and spasms: just another reminder that his body really couldn't endure the privations of the camp indefinitely. Julian braced a palm on each of the walls at his sides, shifting all of his weight onto his left leg so that he could lift his right foot. He slid it backward, the toe of his boot skimming the dusty floor, until the sole touched the lip of the entrance to the tunnel. Julian wobbled a little as he tried to raise his foot over it, and he grimaced into the gloom as he braced more forcefully.

Before him, still almost in his lap, Tain was hanging his heavy head and sawing shallowly for breath. It had been too long since the last pulse assessment, and Julian had to fight the urge to hurry. If he slipped, and wedged them tighter, that would waste far more time than simply executing this movement smoothly and carefully.

Slowly, Julian slid his foot backward, out into the room, dropping his knee as he went. He deepened the crouch his left leg was still trapped in, trying not to prod Tain too aggressively as he did so. He let his palms slide down the wall, still using both of them for balance. His patella struck the lip of the entrance in just the right place to fire off his deep tendon reflex, with the result that his leg tried to kick against the floor of its own accord.

"Doctor?" Parvok said worriedly.

"It's fine," said Julian. His teeth weren't exactly clenched with the force of his concentration, but his jaw was definitely set. "Major? Are we still clear?"

He didn't have any idea what he'd do if they were not. He was past the point of no return now. Julian slipped his leg a little farther back, his thigh now past the point of being perpendicular to his spine, and dropped down the remaining few centimetres so that he was kneeling on the floor of the main room of the barracks, while everything above the knee was still inside the wall.

Then came the tricky part. He couldn't quite get his other knee to the ground: his left boot was jammed against the wall, toes flexed, and Tain's foot was in the way of his shin. But Julian lowered it as far as he could, took a deep breath, and released it slowly as he bowed forward over the place where his lap should have been, slowly extending his right leg so that his thigh began to slide out into the room as well. All the while, he kept his palms pressed to the walls like a man trying to skid down a mineshaft without a rope. When he thought he was low enough, he shifted his left foot and propelled himself backward out of the crawlspace: buttocks and hips, waist, ribs, shoulders, and finally, one arm at a time. He reached the tipping point beyond which he was able to slide out on his right knee, pulling his left leg after him as it extended before him. Then he planted his palms on the floor, pushed off, and hopped nimbly to his feet.

Well, his right knee was fully healed from the hyperextension injury, anyway.

Julian crouched down to peer into the wall, gripping the ledge between the two holes with his right hand, and reaching into the gloom with his left. "Tain?" he said, as forcefully as he dared. He was trying to keep his voice down, knowing that someone might wander by the barracks door at any moment. Kalenna's warnings wouldn't do much good if they overheard anything suspicious. "Can you get out? Tain?"

He was just beginning to think he was going to need to get down on the floor again and go crawling in after the Cardassian when, with a grunt and a noise of unbridled disgust, Tain slapped his palms down on the floor and began dragging himself on hands and knees towards the light.

As soon as his broad shoulders cleared the opening that was technically too narrow to accommodate them, Julian took hold of Tain's left arm, and nodded to Parvok, who took the right. Together, they helped Tain to haul his heavy, failing body over the lip, and away from the wall.

"That's good," said Julian, breathless with relief as he bobbed his head to the Romulan Sub-Lieutenant. "I've got him. Shut up the wall."

"Quickly," Kalenna intoned in a low, crisp voice. She was still staring out into the corridor, and though the word was not panicked, it was certainly urgent.

Parvok hastened to obey, and Julian tried to position himself for the considerable exertion of helping Enabran Tain to his feet. But instead of taking the hand offered to him, Tain lowered himself to the floor, rolling onto his right shoulder, eyes closed and chest heaving.

"All right," Julian said softly, landmarking for a pulse. It was wandering, but strong. Tain's efforts to breathe had now taken on the timbre of exhausted relief, rather than the note of strangulation he'd heard inside the wall. The Cardassian's steel-coloured hair was in disarray, and his skin was slick with cold perspiration. "It's all right. You can rest. General?" He looked up at Martok, who had been standing judiciously clear of the wall. "Can you pass me a blanket and his pillow?"

The Klingon nodded. Julian eased the lumpy cushion under Tain's head and spread the blanket over him. The wall panels were back in place, and Kalenna dared to abandon the lookout at the door in order to help Parvok move the cot back to its usual spot. They had to lift it over Tain's feet, which were trailing almost to the mouth of the crawlspace, but then the room was in order again.

Julian wanted to listen to Tain's chest, and he was going to have to get the man's trousers off sooner or later so that he could see how seriously the electrical charge had burned him. But for now, it seemed more merciful — and likely, far more clinically sound, given the lack of resources — to let the man rest. If his breathing continued to grow less urgent, and his pulse found its rhythm unaided, that would offer the best chance for a positive outcome.

Julian slid sideways onto his hip, and leaned back against the bench, closing his eyes in weary gratitude. There had been a moment or two there where he hadn't believed he'd be able to get Tain out of the wall. And close on the heels of that relief came another, far deeper and more joyous. His eyes shot open and he lifted his head, looking from Martok, to Kalenna, to Parvok.

"It's sent," Julian said, breathless himself with the wonder of the pronouncement. "The message has been sent. The transmitter's running. He did it."

Parvok gasped. Kalenna's eyes grew wide. Martok stamped a victorious foot. "By the sword of Kahless!" he cried. "I knew the stubborn old hound had it in him!"

When Kalenna spoke, she was clearly carried away by celebratory hope, but her question was mordantly pragmatic. "How long with it take the signal to reach the nearest Starfleet listening post?"

That was a good question, and Julian didn't have a good answer. "I don't know," he admitted. "There are too many variables: the strength of the transmission, the proximity of the nearest satellite — I still don't know exactly where we are in relation to anything else — and whether the message runs into any ionic interference en route. But it's only a matter of time, that's the main thing. And…"

He couldn't say it. He was dismayed he'd actually thought it. But he saw the five eyes of his cellmates shift in unison to Tain where he lay wheezing on the floor, and he knew they were all thinking it too.

Live or die, Tain had done his job.

 _(fade_ )

The burn on Tain's inner thigh was only about the diameter of a kanar bottle stopper, but it sank deep into the subdermal tissues. A hard, glistening blister had formed over it by the time Julian was finally able to coax Tain to let him take a look. He found the exit wound high on Tain's hip, where he had been bracing against the bulkhead behind him. It was considerably larger, a scorched crater about eight centimetres across at its widest point. Unlike the entry burn, it was an irregular shape, like the starburst of energy that had dissipated through it. Julian disinfected it as gently as he could, and affixed one of the sterile pads over it. He wrapped Tain's leg with the lint bandage instead: the blister would keep that burn sterile, as long as they could keep the bleb intact.

What Julian could not assess, without the aid of a tricorder or biobed scanner, was the extent of the damage to the tissues between Point A and Point B. But either Tain had been lucky, or he'd been damnably smart. If he hadn't had his hip jammed against the tritanium bulkhead, providing the quickest grounding route for the charge, it would have travelled to the level of his shoulder-blades, which had also been leaning on the bulkhead. That would have taken the charge through several internal organs, and possibly even his heart. It hadn't been an especially high charge: the burns were of moderate severity at most. But it probably would have been enough to short-circuit his sinoatrial node. It could have killed him.

Julian didn't say any of this to his patient. There was nothing to be gained from scolding a desperately sick man. For now, it was enough for Tain to rest, and bask in his triumph, and try to gather his strength for the morning. There was still tomorrow's count to contend with. And the one after that. And the one after that.

Julian didn't know how long it would take the message to reach Deep Space Nine, through the layers of listening relays and data sorting algorithms. But once it did reach the station, it would be at least a couple of days before any response could be mounted. First, Worf would try to decrypt it himself, possibly consulting with Starfleet Intelligence and the experts in Cardassian cryptography on Bajor. Eventually, if Tain was right about the impenetrability of his code, they'd realize they weren't having any luck. Then someone, surely, would think to pass it on to Garak.

But that was the part that made Julian uneasy. It had occurred to him before, weeks ago, that it was he who would have ordinarily suggested involving the tailor. He had done so in the past. If the Changeling was still on the station — a nauseating thought that Julian had to skirt around as swiftly as possible — would he know enough about Julian to make the recommendation in his stead? And if the Changeling had been found out weeks ago, as Julian desperately hoped he had, would someone else think of the one-time Obsidian Order operative when they came up against the unsolvable cypher? Odo knew Garak's tactical value, and more than a little about his many talents. Captain Sisko had made use of Garak's skills before now. Surely one of them would think of passing the message along. They'd have to.

Or, of course, it was possible that Garak had greater access to the station's communications array than anyone guessed. If that were so, he might spot the message before it worked its way through Worf's transmission backlog. That would cut the timeline of events on one end, but probably lengthen it on the other: how would Garak be able to persuade Captain Sisko to mount a rescue expedition, if he first had to explain how he'd gotten his hands on a classified Gamma Quadrant transmission?

Julian realized he might worry himself into the grave trying to work through every possible scenario, every conceivable combination of factors and the outcomes each led to. By his cursory estimation, there were no fewer than six hundred thirty possible permutations of events, and that was assuming he'd accounted for all the variables — which really did seem unlikely. He had been in this place for twenty-six Dominion Standard Days. Adding to that the time he could account for on Meezan IV, and travel to the pretty pleasure planet from the station, he'd been away from Deep Space Nine for forty Bajoran days by a conservative estimate. That didn't take into account transit time while sedated by his Vorta kidnappers. Who knew what had happened on Deep Space Nine in his absence, or how intervening events might alter the possibilities for his scenarios?

It was better to try to shut down — or shut up — the part of his brain that seemed to think life was a series of statistical probabilities. He focused on monitoring Tain's vital signs until he was confident the Cardassian was stable enough to be moved. Then he orchestrated the process, first sliding a blanket folded in half under the length of Tain's body, then using it as a stretcher to lift him onto the cot. It was no easy task for Julian and Parvok, even with their genetic predilection (one natural, one anything but) for significant strength, and when it was done they both had to sit for a few minutes, stretching and kneading strained arms.

Then Julian gave instructions to Kalenna for watching over Tain, took a much-needed draught from his canteen, and went outside. He wanted to find the prisoner who had been in the ring that afternoon, so he could offer what care he was able. The distress signal was out there, rippling through subspace at many times the speed of light. But here in Internment Camp 371, life limped wearily on.

( _fade_ )

The day's combat was over, which was not a surprise. The Jem'Hadar were back at their posts, and a few brave prisoners had emerged from the shadows. Julian approached the nearest Romulan. He knew better than to pester the Cardassians, this deep into orbital night.

"Do you know who was in the ring today?" he asked. But the Romulan only cast him a fearful glance and hastened away. Julian watched him go, perplexed.

The next one wouldn't even look at him, and by the time the third hissed; "Mind your own business, human: there's nothing you can do for him now!", Julian was beginning to feel slippery with dread.

"He's right, you know," a low, bitter voice oozed out of the shadows behind him. "There's nothing you can do for him now. And no way you can harm him."

Julian whirled around, startled. He had just passed the pylon that arced up to support this section of the dome, and he hadn't noticed anyone standing near it. But stepping away from it now was the gaunt, hard-eyed Glinn who had aided Trel Lugek in his attempt to steal Julian's boots on his first day in the camp. The man had made no secret of the fact that he blamed Julian for his friend's death, and it had been because of him that Julian had avoided Barracks 22 during his nutritional study.

"He's dead?" asked Julian. "Who?"

The Glinn shrugged. "Some Romulan," he spat. "The guard broke him over one knee. Snapped his back like a branch. They've already vaporized the body."

Julian felt the colour drain from his face. One more to add to the roll of the dead. He had met and examined almost every Romulan in the camp. They were all his patients. Now he'd lost one, and he had not even been there to bear witness.

The Cardassian sneered unpleasantly. "Who was he to you? You don't even know which one it was."

"It doesn't matter," said Julian softly, knowing he was staring into the middle distance but unable to stop himself. "They're all my patients."

"Patients!" spat the Glinn. "You still don't understand, do you, human? We don't have patients here. We don't have lives anymore. We have nothing. Nothing but what the Dominion allows us, which as far as I can see amounts to hunger, suffering, boredom and death."

Julian wasn't listening to the nihilistic words. He'd heard something else. "We?" he asked. His brows knit together and his eyes came back into focus as he stared at the Cardassian. "Are you a doctor?"

"I'm nothing," said the other man, cold with hatred. Then he relented, just a little. "But if you mean  _was I a doctor_ , the answer is no. I was a combat medic in the Fourth Order, before I was recruited by one of Nador's underlings."

Julian's jaw slackened. "You were a combat medic?" he asked. "Then why aren't you offering aid to anyone? Why didn't you help me treat your friend? Why didn't you  _say_  anything?"

The Glinn laughed. It was a thin, sour sound that chilled Julian's blood. "Cardassians have no respect for battlefield butchers. They barely tolerate their physicians. Haven't you learned that, yet? I know what you've been doing."

"If you mean my nutritional study—" Julian began.

"Is that what you call it?" the man asked disdainfully. "Systematic harassment of every prisoner on this forsaken rock, and to what end?"

Julian felt suddenly weary. He understood now why the man hated him. He hadn't felt able to use his own skills or to practice his own profession. And then a Starfleet doctor had shown up in the camp, insistently offering aide to all comers regardless of species — regardless even of the line between captor and captive. By doing so, Julian had slowly but surely gathered the respect and consideration of most of the prison population, even the Cardassians who had, so it seemed, scorned their own combat medic. He was in Enabran Tain's inner circle. Gul Nador trusted him. Almost every Cardassian in the place was at least civil to him, and most were frankly courteous. Julian had all of this, and the Glinn before him had nothing — not even his friend the boot-thief.

And the question struck home, as Darok's similar remark would have done the other day, if not for his astonishment at Kalenna's brilliant machinations. To what end, indeed?

"I hoped if I could find out what was missing from our diet, I could persuade the Vorta to provide it," Julian said wearily. "I know what Martok and I need, and the Romulans are anemic. But I have no idea what causes the condition your people call  _taret rol_."

The Glinn was staring at him with an odd expression on his face. "Somehow, I did not expect you to admit your failure so readily," he muttered. "You have talked to every Cardassian in this place, and you still do not know what causes  _taret rol_?"

Julian shook his head. "None of them could tell me. And I didn't speak to  _every_  Cardassian. I've left two barracks unsurveyed, but…" He shrugged. He didn't feel the need to get into the finer points of study design. It didn't matter at this point.

The other man snorted, rolling his eyes. "Now, why doesn't  _that_  surprise me?" he asked. "Why bother to learn about something, when you can just climb the chain of command far enough that it can never touch you? Arrogant fools, all of them."

Julian felt a knee-jerk need to argue, but he really could not. He'd seen how many of the Cardassian officers had shrunk from the idea that they ever conceivably suffer from the disease of poverty and want. They all looked at it as a shameful thing, and avoided even speaking about it. But then a thought dawned, and he wondered why he hadn't considered it immediately.

"What does cause it?" he asked. "How can we treat it?"

" _We_  can't. Not here," said the Glinn. "On Cardassia, it can be treated with dark leafy greens or fruit — brescha is particularly good for that. Vole liver is a rich source, too: they store it there, instead of in the intestine like Cardassians do. If not for the voles, a lot of poor families would never have survived the famines."

Julian remembered Drevar saying something similar on the day he'd explained the condition, linking his own survival and that of his siblings to the return of the voles in the spring. "A rich source of what?" he asked.

The Cardassian looked at him with cold contempt. "Anhydrous ascorbate, human," he spat. "Haven't you been listening?"

The tone was lost on Julian. A small, ironical smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He'd been expecting a third deficiency, but it turned out there were only two after all. Anhydrous ascorbate was just another form of Vitamin C.

( _fade_ )

Again, despite the strain on his aged, faltering body and his slowly fading heart, Tain survived the night. By curfew, Julian felt confident enough of this outcome that he caved to the urge to lie down on his own cot for the first time in days. He was too sore and exhausted to endure another night on the floor, and it felt heavenly to stretch out on the thin pallet suspended over strips of malleable webbing, instead of the pitiless stone composite. That feeling only lasted a few minutes, however, before Julian started feeling the pressure points where the straps crossed one another, and the awkward contortion of his neck to keep his head from resting on the cylindrical crossbar. Tain had Julian's pillow, supplementing his own to raise his head a little farther. General Martok's, which the Klingon never used anyway, was under the Cardassian's shoulder blades. It was a far cry from the perfect twenty-degree slope Julian would have programmed into a biobed for his patient, but it was the best they could manage. That, and the extra mattress, were the only comforts they could offer Tain.

And the blankets. Tain still had four, but one was underneath him now. It seemed like a waste to Julian, who lay on his side, hugging himself against the bite of the air and silently cursing the perverse imagination of the Vorta, who exacted this spiteful penalty from his prisoners for a cosmic phenomenon they could not control. But even his resentment for Deyos was muted somewhat tonight, because the end was finally in sight. Julian couldn't estimate an accurate timeline for it, but he knew that rescue  _would_ come. Garak would get the message one way or another, and somehow he would find a way to procure a ship and whatever else he needed to track the message to its source. To Enabran Tain and, incidentally, to the rest of them as well.

There was light at the end of the tunnel, at last. Not the smoky little miner's lamp of hope that Julian had tried so desperately to shelter all these weeks, but the first real rays of sunlight on the other side. Rescue. Home. Plentiful food and clean clothes and soft, warm beds… but most of all? The Infirmary, with its surgical suite and its state-of-the-art instruments and its dispensary full of every worthwhile medication known to Federation science. In the Infirmary, Julian could stabilize Tain's cardiovascular system. He could repair his heart or, failing that, replace it with an artificial organ that would last for decades. In the Infirmary, he could undo all the damage done to General Martok's joints and ligaments. He could heal the man's scars. He could give him an ocular replacement implant to restore his unbalanced sight. In the Infirmary, Julian could give Parvok and Kalenna depot infusions of copper oxide to resolve their anemia, and assess them for their other medical needs. He could even try to satisfy himself as to the Breen's state of health, if he could get some frame of reference. Nothing was out of reach, not in the Infirmary…

Lost in this wistful litany of eager dreams for the future, Julian fell asleep.

 _(fade_ )

Morning came, and with it the struggle to get Tain upright and out for the count. It was harder than yesterday, but easier than the day before that. Ever the stubborn one, Tain insisted on visiting the waste reclamation unit instead of relieving himself in the bedpan. Julian and Parvok were his escort, and it fell to Kalenna to restore the barracks to inspection standard. Martok was under strict instructions to avoid straining his elbow; Julian couldn't bear to think of the state the joint capsule must be in after the serial dislocations. Nevertheless, the General insisted on taking his place at Tain's left side for the ordeal ahead.

Tain was in pain again. As much as it galled Julian to stand uselessly by while one of his patients suffered without analgesia, he knew — and continued to insist to himself — that it was in this case a good sign. The anti-interrogation implant was probably the only thing keeping Tain's life liveable when the angina flared, but the flares themselves were ominous. The earthquake analogy held, as far as Julian could see. Each episode was another seismic tremor, a next-magnitude warning of the catastrophe to come. One day, barring some actual medical intervention, the fault line would collapse, and Tain's heart would give out entirely. If when that happened, Julian still had no access to a defibrillator, or a stasis chamber, or a surgical suite, Enabran Tain would die. It was as simple as that.

For the time being, however, he stood, enduring the pain with silent resentment and waiting, as all the other prisoners were waiting, for Deyos to emerge so their daily torment could begin. But Deyos did not come. At the appointed time, First Ikat'ika appeared, accompanied by the Third instead of the Second, and flanked by two of the younger soldiers. The count was brisk, efficient, and brief. No explanation was offered. No questions were asked, not even among the prisoners when they were given the order to disperse. Julian, supporting Tain but too stunned to start coordinating the journey back to Barracks 6, looked around in bewilderment.

"General?" he said helplessly. Martok, who was supporting Tain's other side with his good arm, looked up in puzzlement. "What…" Julian tried. "Why?"

"Why?" echoed Martok. It was clear he did not understand the question. But Julian was still looking around. Where was Deyos? They had made no plans for a diversion. All six of them were accounted for: the Breen was standing with their back to one of the pillars, Parvok and Kalenna were wending their way through the scattering crowd. But how had they won this reprieve, if no one had taken any action.

"Are you all right, Doctor?" Kalenna asked softly as she drew near. "You look… distressed."

Julian shook his head as if to throw off his bewilderment and the low but undeniable current of panic coursing through him. He had grown accustomed to the daily pattern of life in the camp, and he'd learned the hard way that change seldom boded well for the prisoners. He couldn't take this boon at face value, however badly Tain needed the ongoing reprieve. He didn't know what the unseen consequences might be.

"The Vorta," he hissed hurriedly. "Where could he have gone? What does it mean? Why—"

Kalenna was shaking her head, looking sympathetic. "You haven't been here long enough," she said, as if with sudden realization. "This is your first cycle. Doctor, the supply ship is in orbit. The Vorta is overseeing the delivery of equipment and rations. There's nothing to fear: it happens every month."

"Every month," Julian repeated. He closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, and forced his heart-rate to level off. He'd been worryingly near panic there for a moment, and all because the count had stopped short of torture. Just how frayed  _were_  his nerves, anyway? He couldn't pause to think about that now. "The supply ship. Of course. Ikat'ika said it would be here in eighteen days…"

Ikat'ika had said that on the day Julian had taken his turn in the ring. It seemed like an eon ago, not a little less than three weeks.

Kalenna's brow furrowed with concern, but she didn't say anything about Julian's rambling recollection. She nodded at Tain, helping to turn him. "We should get you back to the barracks," she said to the silent Cardassian. "You need to rest."

"Rest…" Now it was Tain who was the echo chamber, his voice distant and rambling. He clutched Julian's arm as the Doctor and the General helped him lay in a course for the barracks pod. "Yes, yes, perhaps that's for the best…"

They moved slowly, letting Tain set the pace. Julian and Martok bore as much of the man's weight as he'd allow them, while Kalenna walked beside, alternating uneasy glances between the Cardassian's face and the human's. Julian couldn't reassure her about either. The forefront of his mind was focused on his patient. The rest of it was mulling over an enticing but simultaneously troubling possibility.

He held his tongue until they were back in Barracks 6, and Tain was once more in bed. The old man drifted into shallow slumber almost as soon as he was supine, exhausted by even that cursory count. Julian checked his pulse and found it slow and laboured. And he made up his mind.

"If the supply ship is here," he asked Kalenna; "does that mean Tiellyn has returned as well?"

"Tiellyn? The Vorta doctor?" Kalenna looked grim — grim, and wary. "Do you think she'll want to examine you again?"

This possibility hadn't occurred to Julian, at least not today. It sent a shiver up his spine, and it was almost as though he could feel her impersonal hands tugging at him, manipulating his body as if he were a puppet or a laboratory animal.

"Then she's here?" he asked.

"I assume so," Kalenna said. Julian started for the door, and she turned to follow him with her eyes. "Doctor! You don't want to go  _looking_  for her. Are you out of your mind?"

Julian slapped the panel to open the door, looking back at his friends. Martok was glowering dourly, but his jaw was set. He might not understand Julian's reasons, but he read his resolve, and he respected it. Kalenna's eyes were almost pleading.

"I have to," said Julian. "She's the only one with real instruments, the only one with medications. I have to try."

" _No…_ " Kalenna whispered, a protest and a prayer at once. But she didn't try to stop him. She, too, respected what she could not understand.

 _(fade_ )


	67. Desperate Measures

**Part XII, Act II: Desperate Measures**

Julian strode up the atrium as swiftly as his scuffed boots would carry him. Faces slipped past as he went, blurring in his peripheral vision: Cardassians, Romulans, a Hunter, the Jem'Hadar. No one spoke to him, or attempted to intercept him, until he reached the mouth of the corridor that led into the administration pod.

Past the first two doors, at their post before the force-field, two guards raised their plasma rifles.

"That is far enough, prisoner," said one. The rank and file used their names so infrequently that even after all these weeks, Julian still didn't know them all. Name or no, he knew the man. This solider had broken a Romulan's nose in the ring, with the same nonchalant thrust of a palm that he might have used to activate a door panel. Julian felt his courage waver just a little, and the rifles pointed squarely at his heart did not help. He knew he did not actually have any more to lose today than he had two days before, and yet that was precisely what he felt. Somehow, the possibility of death seemed more immediate and more terrible now that the message was transmitting. What kind of cruel irony would it be to die now, when the prospect of rescue had finally crystallized?

But of course, Tain had to be feeling much the same thing. Julian hardened his resolve and forced his voice to come out resolute but not defiant.

"I need to speak to Tiellyn," he said.

The guard snorted almost soundlessly. "The Vorta have no interest in speaking to prisoners."

"I think she'll speak to me," said Julian. "Ask her."

The other guard cast his superior a wary glance, while the first Jem'Hadar's eyes narrowed. "We do not  _ask_  the Vorta anything," he said. "They command, and the Jem'Hadar obey. That is the Order of Things."

"Do you ever inform them of anything?" asked Julian, feeling it would simply be easier to fit himself into the Dominion's social hierarchy, rather than arguing with an immutable wall.

The soldier thrust out his jaw a little, tilting his head slightly back. "Of course!" he said, sounding almost indignant. "Updating the Vorta on situations of tactical significance is an essential part of our function."

"Well," said Julian, feeling just a little pleased with himself; "I am of tactical significance."

The flinty eyes contracted to slits of suspicion again. "I do not see how, human. You are no threat. You are a prisoner. Unarmed. I could kill you where you stand."

"Haven't you considered that I might be an asset?" asked Julian. "A tactical advantage, rather than a threat?"

The guard flared his nostrils contemptuously. "That seems unlikely," he sneered.

Julian shrugged. "If you're willing to take that risk, far be it from me," he said, turning so that he could begin to stroll nonchalantly away. He took three steps and started in on a fourth, beginning to think that he had lost the gamble. Then a cold voice stilled him.

"Do not move, prisoner!" the Jem'Hadar snapped. To his partner, he said; "Inform the Vorta."

"I?" said the other guard dubiously. Julian, obediently frozen with his back to the soldiers, did not see what passed between them — but it must have been eloquent. A moment later, the Jem'Hadar said stiffly; "Yes, sir."

Julian resisted the urge to turn as the crackle of the falling force-field made the hairs on the back of his neck stand briefly on end. A moment later, it snapped back into place.

"You may turn," the more senior guard said grudgingly, sounding almost irritated to have to say it — although he likely would have responded with violence if Julian had taken the initiative on his own. He turned, slowly.

They had three awkward minutes of standing there, two and a half metres apart, staring at one another. Julian was beginning to regret framing himself as a tactical asset because he didn't much care for the way the Jem'Hadar was staring at him — scrutinizing every detail, looking for weaknesses. He clearly saw it, too, because the tip of the plasma rifle slipped down a little lower, until a rapid fire would send the beam into Julian's thigh, not his heart. A direct hit would vaporize him, wherever it struck, but there was no denying that the psychological menace of the weapon was markedly reduced when it was no longer trained centre mass.

He remembered everything the others had said about the Jem'Hadar preying on weakness, and Julian knew it wasn't actually an advantage to be perceived as a negligible threat. But when he considered what the guards who had witnessed his bouts in the ring wanted to do to him, he couldn't be too displeased that this one wasn't looking at him as a threat.

Finally, the door to Deyos's office opened. Two Jem'Hadar Julian did not recognize came striding out first, taking a broad armorial stance on either side of the door. Then came Tiellyn herself, high-heeled shoes clacking on the stone. She was wearing a different suit than she had sported on her last visit, this one with a plunging asymmetrical neckline, but the earrings were the same. They swung pendulously as she approached the invisible barrier with idle hauteur.

"Well, now," she said silkily, looking Julian up and down. "And I thought I would have to send Gorotok'ren to fetch you. Do you count telepathy among your unusual abilities, as well as bare-handed surgery?"

As Julian's innards wrenched in dismayed dread, Tiellyn nodded curtly at the prison guard. "Lower the containment field," she commanded.

It fizzled into nothingness, and Tiellyn beckoned to Julian. "Come here,  _Doctor_ ," she said with the mocking scorn he remembered all too well. It sent a chill up his spine far deeper than any born of the frigid air temperature.

But he had come here to speak to her, and he refused to lose his nerve. He drew in a surreptitiously deep breath. and stepped forward. Scarcely had he passed the place where the containment field generator had been installed when it snapped back to life behind him with a nerve-biting clamour of static electricity. It made him jump — only ever-so-slightly, but Tiellyn saw it and she smirked. She didn't give voice to her mockery, however, contenting herself instead with seizing his arm and steering him purposefully into the Vorta's office.

Deyos was standing at his computer terminal, trying to look disdainfully indifferent. The glowering glance he shot at Julian betrayed him, however: he was deeply displeased by this interruption.

Tiellyn abandoned Julian in the middle of the room, wandering off towards the partition at the back, studying the seam of the ceiling. "You're quite a conundrum, you know," she said. "A fascinating specimen. By far the most interesting one we've brought back from the Alpha Quadrant so far."

One of the unfamiliar Jem'Hadar made a noise deep in his throat, and Tiellyn turned to him with a silken smile. "Yes, Third," she said placatingly. "I know you envy Ikat'ika his Klingon. Would you like to go and find him? I'm sure the First would be willing to share."

The soldier stiffened even more rigidly to attention and said tightly; "It is my duty to accompany you while you are on the surface, Vorta. My own interests are immaterial."

"That's right, they  _are_ ," Tiellyn sighed regretfully, as if she'd forgotten this. "Though if you're not curious about this human after what he did to this outpost's Eighth, I have to question your dedication to strategic advancement."

"I am curious, Vorta," the Jem'Hadar said, a little too hastily. "But I am also repulsed."

"I suppose that's only fair," said Tiellyn. "Your people do take their devices  _very_  seriously."

 _So would you,_ Julian thought wrathfully, disgusted by her lack of empathy for her men;  _if those devices fed you an addictive substance you required to survive_. But he was not here to advocate for the Jem'Hadar.

"There's another case that might interest you," he said instead, gathering his resolve.

Tiellyn looked at him in surprise. "More interesting than  _you_?" she asked. "I doubt that."

"Interesting… in a different way," Julian said. He could not quite believe he was doing this. If not for the absolute necessity of securing medication and instruments, it would have been unforgivable to draw this woman's pitiless eye towards one of his patients. "Something you won't have seen before, at least not among the Vorta or the Jem'Hadar. Not among of the Alpha Quadrant prisoners, either, assuming most of us are young and active combatants."

She smiled chillingly at him. "And why would you assume that?"

It was a good question, and Julian had no answer. He thought of Ambassador Krajensky, missing without a trace, replaced by a Founder sent to thwart the crew of the  _Defiant._  He felt a sudden urge to ask if he was among Tiellyn's subjects — the other humans in other camps to which she had alluded. He doubted he'd be able to get much out of her, but if he could bring home at least some news of the man's fate, it would mean something to his family.

Julian didn't ask the question. He had to stay focused. "I… I don't know," he admitted. "But surely you must be interested in the diseases of old age, since you don't see them among your own people. Or…"

"Or the Jem'Hadar," she finished for him, nodding. "You are correct. Neither the Vorta nor the Jem'Hadar live into the years of decrepitude. I don't see what would interest me about them, though, much less what  _you_  might be able to show me."

"There's a prisoner suffering from heart failure and degenerative arrhythmia," said Julian hastily. "There's nothing I can do for him with the equipment at my disposal, but if you were willing to give me the means to treat him, I could—"

"You could  _what_?" she asked scornfully. "Allow me the privilege of observing? Your determination does you credit,  _Doctor_ , but if you think I'm interested in this case, you are sorely mistaken. The study of the old and infirm… what do you call it?"

"Gerontology," Julian said flatly. He could see that he had lost, that he'd misjudged the breadth of her curiosity. Tain might well die for his failure to engage this heartless woman.

"That," said Tiellyn dismissively. "It is useless. The old themselves are useless. When the Vorta begin to falter, either in body or in mind, they are terminated and replaced. In the rare instances when a Jem'Hadar survives his years of loyal service long enough to begin showing joint degeneration or repetitive strain injuries beyond the scope of a simple repair, they too are terminated and replaced. That way, they do not drain precious resources that could be used to restore a wounded soldier to full combat capacity. If less enlightened species insist upon keeping their elders around long enough for a  _heart_  to begin to fail, I have no sympathy for them. And no interest in correcting for the deficiencies of age."

Julian had thought he had grown accustomed to the calloused savagery of the Dominion and its servants. He had believed there was nothing they could say that could shock him, and that he'd become too worn down and desensitized to try something as futile as arguing such a point. Yet he could not help himself. He thought of all the desperate things he and Tain had tried in the last few days, fighting off the inevitable, and his blood boiled.

"The elderly deserve better than to be thrown away!" he snapped. "Never mind a lifetime's contributions to society, and the betterment of those around them — they've got decades of experience and knowledge to impart. They've got a unique perspective on the world around them, ways of looking at problems and finding solutions that younger people can't. They're not just wanted, they're  _needed_ , and thinking you can be so cavalier with a life — any life at all, but especially—"

She was laughing at him, head tossed back, chimes of scorn spilling from darkly stained lips. At the computer pylons, Deyos was smirking. The Jem'Hadar stood stonily silent, but Julian thought he could see the ridicule in their cold eyes, too.

Tiellyn came towards him, planting a palm on either side of his face and shaking his whole head in one tight, shivering movement that jarred Julian's neck uncomfortably. "Oh, you are  _amusing_ , human!" she mocked. "And you  _never_  stop trying, do you? Why, you're almost as convinced of the rightness of your pitiful little philosophy as I am of the wisdom of the Founders. How do you do it? How do you put such faith in myths and fairy tales?  _They're not just wanted, they're needed:_ wonderful! I suppose next you'll tell me that your species' first decade and a half of life is the most precious part, even though you're underdeveloped, feeble, and ignorant for practically all of it.  _A unique perspective on the world around them._ Exquisitely ridiculous."

Julian wanted to pull away from her. He couldn't bear the feeling of her unnaturally smooth palms against his cheeks. He was even grateful for the prickly scruff of his beard, because it provided at least a flimsy half-barrier between his skin and Tiellyn's. But if he tried to pull away, it would affirm her power over him; her ability to get to him. He held his ground.

"What do you want from me?" he spat. "What will you take in exchange for the medication and equipment I need to treat Tain?"

Tiellyn tilted her head. "Tain?" she echoed. Then she glanced towards Deyos and repeated, "Tain?"

"Enabran Tain," said the other Vorta. They were the first words he'd spoken since Julian had been brought into the room, and they dripped disdain and lackadaisical boredom. "The Cardassian who led the sortie against the Great Link."

"The  _blasphemer_ ," Tiellyn breathed deliciously, turning back to Julian with a predatory grin. "Perfect.  _He_ is the precious life worthy of preservation and care, Doctor? A genocidal solid with delusions of godhood?"

"It doesn't matter what he did, or tried to do," said Julian hoarsely. "Not to me. To me, he's a patient. He needs care. He deserves care. Where I come, no crime — not even genocide — carries a death penalty. Even if it did, it's not my place to carry out such a sentence."

"I supposed not," said Tiellyn, releasing his face. She studied her palms and then wiped them disdainfully on the front of Julian's jumpsuit before wandering over to her instrument cart — standing in a corner near the back of the room — to fish out a sonic sterilizer for her palms. "You're filthy, you know that?" she asked. "Your face is greasy. That… foliage of yours. Disgusting."

Julian didn't rise to that bait, and he tried not to feel the hot flush of humiliation creeping up behind his ears. "What do you want from me?" he asked. "In exchange for instruments and medication."

She looked at him with an idle sort of intrigue. "Just like that?" she asked. "You'd give me anything I asked for? Starfleet battle plans? Access codes? Strategic emplacements?"

 _No_ , thought Julian. Even to save his patient, he couldn't give her those. His oath as a physician might supersede his oath to Starfleet, but the primary article of that oath was clear:  _primum non nocere_. First, do no harm. The harm he could do, the innocent lives he could cost, if he betrayed the Federation were incalculable.

But he didn't have to refuse her outright. "I have only limited access to battle plans, usually only when an action is imminent," he said. "Strategic emplacements in the Bajoran sector are beyond my remit as Chief Medical Officer. And if Captain Sisko has caught the Changeling who replaced me, all of my access codes have been changed weeks ago. But I'll answer all of your questions about… about me."

" _You_?" Tiellyn drawled. "Why would I have any questions about  _you_? We have a complete psychographic profile of you. The Dominion has everything we need to know; all your records, all your work. The  _Founder_  who replaced you has access to your patients' medical records, to your personal writings, to everything. Better still, the Founders have the memories of the one of the Hundred who serves aboard your space station. Firsthand knowledge of your behaviour and your personality — priceless! What could  _I_  possible need from  _you_?"

A shiver went up Julian's spine.  _Firsthand knowledge of your behaviour and your personality_. She was talking about Odo. Odo's memories and perceptions of him, gathered when he was in the Great Link. Julian had not considered this aspect of the Dominion's espionage. He had been holding out hope that Odo had noticed defects in this counterfeit, as he had in the Changeling who'd replaced Martok. But if the Founder's impersonation of Julian Bashir was informed by Odo's own perceptions… how could the Constable be expected to see through the ruse?

He tried frantically to shut his mind to that thought, and the one bounding close upon its heels. He needed to focus on the negotiations at hand. Those other fears…

"Why did you want to see me again, if you have no questions?" Julian said, through a throat almost too dry to form the words.

"Who said I wanted to see you again?" challenged Tiellyn.

Julian's eyes met hers, suddenly defiant. She could play games with his confidence, but she couldn't challenge the integrity of his enhanced memory pathways. "You did," he said. "You said that you thought you would have to send Gorotok'ren to fetch me. Why fetch me, unless there's something you still don't know?"

Tiellyn smiled again, clearly savouring the thrust and parry. "Marvellous," she said. "I'm beginning to think your people will be far more enjoyable to rule than I had anticipated. Those that survive the conquest, that is. Yes, I have questions. But I'm not interested in bartering for answers, particularly not for the benefit of a ruined husk of a Cardassian murderer. Sorry, Doctor. Nice try."

Julian knew when he was defeated. Help for Tain was beyond reach, unless perhaps he could steal something from that cart in the corner. The trouble was that without Tiellyn's guidance, he'd have no idea  _what_  he was stealing: vials of medication with labels he could not read, medical instruments of unfamiliar design. None of the ones he'd been allowed to use on Amcet or the Jem'Hadar he'd treated would do anything for Tain's heart.

But there were other things he needed from the Vorta — from one Vorta or the other. He had nothing Deyos needed or wanted. Tiellyn was Julian's best hope.

"Would you do it for something else?" he asked. "For the interests of the other prisoners. The…" The words almost stuck in his throat, smacking as they did of the legacy of eugenics. "The fit among us. The young. The… the ones who are of use to the Jem'Hadar in the ring."

Tiellyn's eyes narrowed. She was standing before him again, watching him thoughtfully. "I'm listening," she said.

"Malnourished opponents are useless opponents," said Julian. "If you want your soldiers to train against Alpha Quadrant species, shouldn't they be training against us in our peak condition? Deyos has Ikat'ika and his men fighting people worn down by hunger and chronic deficiencies. The Romulans are anemic. The other species in the camp — most of us, anyhow, are suffering from an ascorbic acid deficiency that impairs wound healing, compromises joint integrity, and in the case of the Cardassians, is causing vital organ tissues to break down. We're starving."

"Lies!" snarled Deyos, who had stiffened at the mention of his name and was now bristling with indignation. "The prisoners are fed daily, according to the guidelines provided to the camps!"

"Oh, we're fed daily," said Julian, not even glancing at him. He kept his eyes locked on Tiellyn. " _Once_  daily, which for many of the species here actually means once every day and a half, more or less. It's not calorically adequate: as far as I've observed, every prisoner in this camp has suffered a reduction of body mass since capture. But more to the point, essential micronutrients are missing from our diet. That's going to kill us long before we waste away."

He thought it might not be  _long before_  in his own case, but he had no intention of giving away his only asset before the bargain was struck.

"Why should I believe you?" asked Tiellyn. "Prisoners are known to lie in order to secure more comfortable conditions. Your kind is not to be trusted."

"You don't need to believe me," said Julian. "Run a basic hematology scan on me. I'm showing symptoms of Vitamin C deficiency already, and I've only been here a month."

"And your anemic Romulans?" she sneered. "I suppose I need to go round up one of them, too?"

"You could," Julian said; "or you could simply think about it for a moment. Romulan hemoglobin is built around copper, not iron. If you feed copper to iron-metabolizing species, it's toxic. They  _can't_  put it in our food, not if one pan of slop is supposed to feed the whole prison. It's leave the Romulans to anemia, or poison the rest of us."

" _Slop_ ," hissed Deyos. "You'll pay for that, human."

Tiellyn didn't seem to have heard her colleague. She sniffed contemptuously. "It is impractical to provide different rations for different groups of inmates," she said. "I will not ask the supervisor of this camp to inconvenience his men and disrupt his institution's routine merely to pander to the needs of one group."

The Breen received a special ration: some kind of nutrient gel they could infuse into a port in their suit. But Julian didn't think it prudent to correct Tiellyn.

"You don't need to alter the rations," he said. "There's another way."

"And that is?" asked Tiellyn.

"An intramuscular depot infusion of dicopper chloride trihydroxide," said Julian. "Suspended in a simple glucan polysaccharide; dextran or laminarin would suffice. Administered into the deltoid muscle once a month, a dose of fifty milligrams elemental copper would be more than adequate to support hemoglobin replenishment."

"For every Romulan on this asteroid?" said Tiellyn. "Do you know how long that would take?"

The question was meant to be rhetorical, but Julian did the mental calculation almost without a conscious thought. "One person with a hypospray and an assistant to hand off fresh vials could dose the whole Romulan population in nineteen minutes thirty-three seconds, assuming an orderly line was formed," he said. "If we each take a hypo, we can do it in half the time."

Tiellyn curled her lips. "Now  _why_ ," she said with slow deliberation; "didn't you just say it would take twenty minutes? That's a very precise calculation,  _Doctor_ , to rattle off just like that."

It was, and in his single-mindedness Julian had forgotten that. His stomach wrenched with more than hunger. His head swam with dread. Never mind the broader implications of such carelessness: had he just tipped his hand before securing his end of the bargain?

"It was," he said in a voice that wavered markedly. "But if you'll agree to do it, I'd be happy to explain."

Tiellyn planted her palm on his chest, just above his heart. She shook her head, clicking her tongue. "You don't need to explain that," she said. "Just tell me: how did you come to be like this? My research showed no human research in creative genetics, and yet what's been done to you, Doctor, is  _very_  creative indeed."

Julian couldn't breathe. He knew it did not matter what the Dominion knew about him. He knew they, unlike Tain, had no reason to present his secret to Starfleet Command. Certainly they had no ethical qualms of their own on the subject. And yet it was still horrific, even unthinkable, to be having such a conversation.

"Copper for the Romulans, and ascorbate added to our daily rations," he said. "That's my price."

"Done," Tiellyn said crisply. "Now tell me. We have no intelligence to indicate humans are capable of anything but rudimentary gene therapy for certain cancers and life-threatening birth defects. Yet here you stand, the product of some  _extremely_ sophisticated postnatal resequencing. Very subtle, too. On first inspection, you're completely indistinguishable from your lesser brethren. Explain."

Julian cringed at the words  _lesser brethren_. He couldn't help it. That was precisely the sort of idea that had fuelled the fires of the Eugenics Wars. The notion that people like him believed such nonsense lay behind the laws that had pruned his potential and would ruin his life if the truth ever came to light back home. Worse, it was a fallacy. Creations like him were not superior: they were unnatural, monstrous, obscene.

But this wasn't the time. He couldn't afford the luxury of self-loathing right now. He had a job to do:  _his_  job, the one that gave his fraudulent life its purpose. Dozens of lives hung upon this negotiation, and if he didn't satisfy the Vorta she would never uphold her promise to supplement the diet that was slowly destroying them all.

"You didn't look far enough back," he said. "We haven't… humans haven't practiced genetic engineering for centuries, but we can. And we did. If you examine the historical records you've stolen from us, under the heading  _Eugenics Wars_ , you should find everything you want. I suppose you didn't bother to look into our laws…"

"Your laws are irrelevant," said Tiellyn. "Soon, you and the rest of your chaotic quadrant will live under the Dominion's laws, which I promise you are far superior."

"Yes, I figured as much," Julian whispered. He felt dizzy, and very much wanted to sit down, even if it meant sinking to the stone floor. That wouldn't be so bad in here, actually: Deyos's room was at least ten degrees warmer than the rest of the compound, at least in orbital night. "It's illegal. Genetic enhancement. I'm illegal. I underwent the procedures on a world called Adigeon Prime. You might not have any intelligence on them yet. They're a neutral system, no threat to you."

"I assure you we have intelligence on every sentient species in the Alpha Quadrant," said Tiellyn airily. Then she looked Julian over and grinned chillingly. "Illegal. What a quaint notion. Outlawing your species's only chance to better itself beyond the limits of your inferior biology. Your Federation is built on the shoulders of fools, Doctor. I'm pleased to see you don't subject yourself to their limitations."

She walked away from him, wafting a bored hand as she went. "Your chromosomes are far more interesting that you are, do you know that? I'll be able to study them for years. And when it comes time to conquer this world — Adigeon Prime, you said? — the Dominion will have a great deal of fascinating debriefing to carry out on its scientists. I'll look forward to it."

 _Unless you start showing signs of joint degeneration or repetitive strain first_ , Julian thought sourly;  _and the Founders terminate you in favour of a newer model_. Improbably, he held his tongue. A moment later, Tiellyn came back with a Dominion-style PADD and a stylus exactly like the one he'd stolen as the blood screening tool for Barracks 6. She handed both to him with lazy contempt.

"Give me the molecular formula for the copper infusion," she commanded. "Be quick about it."

Julian obeyed as swiftly as his fingers would let him, almost forgetting his personal misery in this moment of professional triumph.

 _(fade_ )


	68. Concession and Countermand

_Note: This chapter owes one of its conversations, as well as a particularly lovely line, to the magnificent imagination of my script consultant, The Phoenix Order. Thank you!_

**Part XII, Act III: Concession and Countermand**

When Tiellyn was finished with him, she merely cast him one last disdainful glance and said; "You're dismissed, prisoner." And Julian left.

He was trembling, and hated himself for it. She had done nothing tangibly harmful: only watched with clinical disinterest as he wrote out the formula for the copper supplement, and then boredly ordered the Jem'Hadar to hold him still. Then with a few more contemptuous remarks about the filthy habits of Alpha Quadrant species, she'd applied the inefficient razor to Julian's face and throat, shearing away the bristly growth of a Dominion week. The fact of being clean-shaven again was in itself a relief; no substitute, perhaps for washing his face with soap and water, much less actually bathing head to toe, but still a concrete improvement in his condition. But the feeling of violation that sprang from the method was deep and dreadful. What Julian wanted — needed — was the means to care for his own body. To be shorn like an animal, not for his own comfort but because his appearance revolted his captors, was a kind of degradation nothing in his Federation upbringing had prepared him to bear.

In the corridor, he was met with another difficulty. He had to convince the Jem'Hadar at the force-field that he had the Vorta's leave to rejoin the rest of the prison population. Julian was not in a frame of mind to put up much of a rhetorical argument, and the task took longer than it should have. In the end, when no one came out of the office in search of him, they got uneasy enough to let him out. Not socially uneasy — Julian doubted the Jem'Hadar were socialized to feel that flavour of discomfort — but disturbed by his repeated weary questioning of just what Tiellyn and Deyos would do or say if they came out to find the prisoner they'd sent away hanging about on the secure side of the corridor. Julian knew he was exaggerating by bringing Deyos into it: the camp commander had done little but murmur vague threats he knew better than to hope were idle. Nevertheless it worked, and he was finally able to step out into the bitter chill of the atrium.

Though his teeth started chattering almost immediately, Julian was glad to be out of the den of his foes. He knew that was irrational when they controlled the whole camp, the asteroid it sat on, the system that held it, and in all likelihood the entirety of the sector beyond. But he felt an instinctive safety in numbers, here among his equals, that he did not feel when alone before the Vorta. Their superior body count was meaningless, of course, while they were unarmed and the guards had plasma weapons, but that didn't alter the relief Julian felt when he stepped out among the plodding, huddled prisoners — a relief that only deepened when he saw Parvok among them, waiting faithfully for him.

"You didn't need to do that," Julian said quietly as they walked back towards Barracks 6 together. "I've been here long enough to be able to find my way to my own cell."

Parvok snorted softly at the flimsy joke, but his eyes were grave. "Major Kalenna wished someone to watch for you," he said. "She is tending to Tain, because he believes you would wish someone to do so."

"I do," said Julian. "I tried to procure the means to help him, but the Vorta wasn't interested."

Saying the words aloud made the failure more tangible, and the bitter frustration harder to ignore. The man was dying a senseless, preventable death, and those with his life in his hands did not even seem to care. Julian closed his eyes and set his jaw, walking on for three paces before he lost his nerve and once more needed to watch where he was going. Parvok was eyeing him uneasily.

"Your face," he said.

Julian's hand went to his cheek. The Vorta's razor didn't shave as close as he liked, but the feel of almost-smooth skin against his palm was positively delicious. Yet with it he could also feel the disdainful grip of Tiellyn's fingers as she tilted his head this way and that. "Yes," he muttered, feeling himself deflate a little further. Groping for any distraction at all, he seized upon an old standard: exobiology. He lifted his eyes questioningly to Parvok's own hairless jaw. "You don't seem to… have that problem."

Parvok shook his head. "Upon admission to the Imperial War College, it is expected for recruits to undergo a follicular suppression procedure. It maintains uniformity and professional appearance in the ranks."

Julian stopped moving, staring at Parvok in numb astonishment. Here he was, shaken by a little involuntary grooming, while elsewhere in the Galaxy such things were a matter of course. And considerably less temporary, it seemed. "Federation upbringing," he breathed, unsure what he felt.

Parvok's oblique brows furrowed. "What's that, Doctor?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Julian, shaking his head wearily. He squared his shoulders with a tired effort, and walked on. "It doesn't matter."

The Sub-Lieutenant followed him, but only as far as the barracks door. As it roared open, he hung back and shrugged apologetically. "I need to…" He gestured vaguely, then sighed, slumping defeatedly into the truth. "Now he is not in the wall for the bulk of the day, I would prefer to be elsewhere."

Julian nodded at this mumbled confession. "Thank you for waiting for me," he said. Then because he did not have the luxury of avoiding Enabran Tain, he stepped over the threshold and let the door slam closed behind him. Although he knew the crash was coming, it still made his whole body startle almost painfully. Trying to ignore the hammering of his heart, he approached Kalenna, who sat on the second bench with her hands folded in her lap.

"He has not awakened," she said quietly, nodding to the Cardassian. "His breathing is laboured, but regular." She looked up at Julian, a guarded question in her eyes. "Did you…?"

Julian shook his head, defeated. "It seems the Vorta have no interest in gerontology. We already knew they have no mercy. Though she did…" He stopped. He couldn't run the risk of raising false hopes. He sighed softly and sat down beside her, raking a hand up into his hair. His fingers snagged on a matted knot and he grimaced thinly. He tried to keep that situation under control as best he could without a comb, but his hair was unruly and overgrown, and in the last couple of days he'd neglected it for the sake of Tain's grim holding pattern.

Kalenna was watching him gravely. "Doctor?" she said.

"It's nothing," Julian said heavily. He felt irrationally exhausted, and the cold was in his very bones. "I'd give a great deal for a hot bath right now, you know?"

She almost smiled. "Yes," she agreed with fervour enough to soften Julian's own expression and alleviate his grim mood just a little. Kalenna's eyes flicked to the bulkhead before them, behind which the transmitter ran on. "We may hope for such things soon enough."

Julian found himself staring at the wall for longer than was strictly necessary. The ache of hope was tight in his chest. How long until the message reached the station? How long after that until help would come?

Kalenna got to her feet. "Excuse me, Doctor," she said. "I will return shortly."

Julian nodded, understanding. Kalenna moved off, slipping past him and the cot on which the Breen sat unmoving.

Left alone with the silent and the slumbering, Julian set about trying to work the tangles out of his hair. His scalp itched miserably, and he scraped at it with ragged nails, raising crescents of dead, greasy skin cells beneath them. The whole thing was a slow, inefficient, and inadequate process, and although he dispersed all but the very worst of the mats, it left him dissatisfied and feeling filthier than before.

When the door opened again, Julian looked to it expecting to see Kalenna. Instead, it was Martok who entered, stumping wearily into the room. He had his left thumb hooked around the strap he used for support while outside in the compound, but as he came in he took hold of his wrist and eased his arm into the front of his vest. The tautness about his weathered mouth eased a little in relief. With that taken care of, he was able to focus on giving Julian a slow, appraising once-over.

"Doctor," he said cautiously, by way of greeting.

"I'm all right," Julian assured him flatly. "I know it was foolish to try, but I had to."

"I respect that need." Martok drew nearer, but he did not sit. He stood over Julian, studying his face. "The Vorta," he growled gravely, at last; "has worked her will upon you."

Again Julian's hand moved for his face. He caught himself in time, though, and let it fall heavily into his lap. He looked away. "Yes."

"She made an attempt to do so with me," the General muttered blackly. Julian looked up at him in surprise. Martok nodded. "Yes, Doctor," he said. He reached with his right hand, the last two fingers still bound together, and felt around the crown of his shaggy head. He extracted a lock of hair far shorter than the rest. "And not my beard alone. It is a grave humiliation to shear a warrior's head without his leave. An assertion of dominance, of his helplessness. I was not helpless that day!"

He squared his shoulders boldly and lifted high his head. He let the hair slip from his fingers. Julian found himself watching the web of scar tissue over the enucleated left socket. Was Martok really suggesting he had fought off Tiellyn's contemptuous advances while under her treatment —  _care_  seemed too dignified a word — for that gruesome wound?

"It's not the same, not really," he demurred. "I'm glad to be clean-shaven again; I don't like the feel of the beard, especially when it's dirty. But to be manhandled like that…" He couldn't suppress a shudder, and he began to curl in on himself again.

He could feel Martok's eyes upon him, solemn with comprehension. "It is a grave indignity, Doctor. Bitter to endure," he murmured. "But the dishonour is the Vorta's alone. It is no blemish upon you."

Julian swallowed painfully. Tiellyn had made him feel powerless and shamed, diminished, less than human. The exchange with Parvok had left him feeling petty and spoiled. Now, in Martok's eyes, he was restored to himself. The General was right: none of them could hold themselves responsible for what their captors did to them. They were utterly at the mercy of the Dominion, and not through any personal fault or failing. As galling as that helplessness was, it could not be enough to rob them of their intrinsic worth and dignity. If they allowed it to do so, the enemy won.

"She's agreed to provide copper supplements for the Romulans," he said, surprising himself. He really had meant to say nothing until the Vorta actually followed through. "I don't know if she'll actually induce Deyos to add ascorbic acid to the rations for the rest of us, but it's possible."

"Aah!" Martok breathed, jerking his chin proudly. "Then you have achieved a victory today, despite the rest."

"I suppose," said Julian uncomfortably. He looked at Tain. "Not the victory that was most needed, though."

"He is dying?" asked Martok gravely.

"Yes." The word was out before Julian had time to censor it, or even to weigh the question. For days he had been qualifying his prognosis:  _if_  he had access to this or that,  _if_  rescue came in time,  _if_  he got Tain to a fully equipped surgical suite. But those were hypotheticals. The truth was that right now, with reality as it presently stood, with no medications and no possibility of operating or even defibrillating if the need arose, Enabran Tain was dying. Slowly but inexorably. It was strangely liberating to admit that, both aloud and in his own heart. The prospect was horrifying, but dancing around the truth had been exhausting. "If I can get him help in time, I might be able to change that. But for now: yes, he's dying. The next cardiac event will probably kill him. Or he'll simply fade away."

His whole body rocked against the bench as Martok gripped his shoulder bracingly. "You are doing all you can," he said. "More than anyone else could do. You have saved him before, when I took him for a dead man. Your determination is the stuff of legend, Doctor. Take pride in that."

Julian nodded, an acknowledgement rather than an agreement. "Maybe," he said. "But right now I'd trade my pride for a medkit and a vial of lectrazine."

Martok released his shoulder, patting it once before drawing in a deep breath. "And that is why you are a credit to your profession," he said. "You would do anything for your patient, I think, whatever the cost to yourself."

The dark thought came to him that this was all too true: if Tain did survive to return to the Alpha Quadrant, and if once there he decided to make good upon his threat, it might well cost Julian everything. Even so, he could not bring himself to hope for any other outcome, nor fail to work towards it. Feeling the need to affirm this with some action, however slight, he got up and reached to feel for Tain's wandering temporal pulse.

"It's not a question of what I  _would_  do," he sighed. "Only what I  _can_  do. Which at present isn't much."

Martok made a low noise of grim condolence, and strode off towards the back of the barracks to pace.

 _(fade_ )

"Prisoners, assemble immediately! I repeat: all prisoners! Assemble immediately!"

Julian's ears were still ringing from the unexpected klaxon, fully half an hour early by his best guess. He'd just started to doze, sitting slumped on his bunk with his back against the wall, and he'd stiffened like the others at the unexpected aural assault. Even Tain stirred, scrubbing at his eyes and muttering a Cardassian curse. Martok had been sitting on one of the benches. Now he was on his feet. Kalenna rose warily, eyes on the ceiling.

"What can they want?" she asked. But there was no time for that question: Julian had another.

"All prisoners," he said. "Are they going to enforce that? Do we have to…?"

He gestured at Tain, who was struggling to roll onto his side, rocking in towards the room with his left arm outstretched. His face was puckered with the strain. He was going to do himself more harm attempting to rise than they'd do by simply helping him outside.

Julian sprang off his cot, closed the distance swiftly, and took the grasping fingers. He used his other hand to heave Tain up into a sitting position. Kalenna was at hand now, too, and between the two of them, they got him standing.

In the atrium, the prisoners were lining up loosely in two rows, looking anxious and bewildered. By the mouth of the alcove where the spartan daily meal was served, the two Vorta stood with their semi-circle of Jem'Hadar bodyguards. The other soldiers had established a loose but menacing perimeter, plasma rifles at low-ready. With Tain clinging resolutely to his arm, Julian shuffled to take his place with the others.

"Romulan prisoners, step forward!" Deyos commanded, his voice ringing imperiously from the rafters. "Form two orderly lines, immediately. And be silent!"

Nervously, with glances at one another, the Romulans obeyed. They did not know what was coming, and clearly feared the worst, but Julian knew better. His heart was hammering not with dread, but with disbelief. Was Tiellyn actually going to hold up her end of their pact? He looked. She did indeed have a hypospray — one in each hand, in fact. And the Jem'Hadar named Gorotok'ren, her Fifth who was also her medical tech, held a shallow tray of vials. Even at this distance, Julian could see the smoky green of the fluid inside.

Deyos surveyed the lines that had formed, a little sloppily, in front of the now gap-toothed rows of non-Romulan prisoners. He seemed satified, because he held his hand out to Tiellyn, clearly expecting to be given one of the hyposprays.

Instead, she shot him a look that would have shrivelled the ego of the most indomitable narcissist. "Not you," she said frostily, the words little more than a hiss of breath. Julian might not have caught them at all but for his unnaturally keen ears. Then she called out, crisply and just as loudly as Deyos had moments before, " _Doctor_. Come and join us."

Julian glanced at Tain, whose eyelids were furled low over glassy orbs. He was the man's only support now, because Kalenna had joined her compatriots in the middle of the atrium. He couldn't very well pry loose Tain's hand and leave him to totter.

But Martok hastened to the Cardassian's other side, offering his own good arm. Tain bared his teeth as he shifted his weight to the left. "Don't be a fool," he hissed as Julian broke away.

He probably was a fool, because he moved without fear or reluctance or even wariness. He slipped between two Cardassians, passed the Romulans, and stepped before Tiellyn as swiftly as his long legs would carry him. When she handed him the second hypospray, Julian had to fight back a grin of joyous surprise. Not only was she administering the suspension as requested, but she was going to let  _him_  take part in the distribution. He would have the satisfaction of seeing his treatment plan through himself.

"You, approach!" Tiellyn commanded, nodding sharply at the first Romulan.

Julian licked his lips, perennially dry in this place of inadequate resources, and risked a few words of his own. "It's a copper supplement," he announced, looking down the rows of pallid, anxious faces. "To treat your anemia. I…"

"Silence, prisoner!" barked Boran'itrex, stepping forward to prod Julian viciously in the ribs with the tip of his plasma rifle. "You were not given leave to speak! Do as you are told, and be silent!"

Julian held his tongue. He'd said enough, anyway. The fear was now muted in the eyes of the people before him, and the two at the heads of the line approached, if not precisely willingly, at least without the blind dread of death. Julian laid his free hand gently on the man's shoulder as he applied the hypo to his deltoid muscle. He wanted to offer a quiet word of encouragement, but the weapon was still digging into his back. Instead, he caught and held the Romulan's eyes for a moment, and offered a reassuring little nod as he pressured in the dose.

It was a quick and efficient process. When the first vial was empty, Julian removed it and Gorotok'ren handed him a fresh one. As each Romulan received his infusion, he scurried off to rejoin the rest of the prison population. Kalenna was third-from-last, and though Julian had thought she'd started out in the other line, it was him she stepped up to. When her eyes met his, they were warm with wonder.

"I promised I'd try," Julian said, forgetting the Second's command. The plasma rifle butted painfully into him again, but he didn't care. Kalenna offered the smallest of smiles, nodding almost imperceptibly. He administered her dose, and she moved swiftly on. Julian gave the last two men their share and then turned to look at Tiellyn.

"Well?" she asked coldly, plucking the instrument from his fingers and handing both to her aide. "What do you have to say to me?"

"Thank you," said Julian earnestly, not caring how that might be perceived. He wasn't concerned with humbling himself. He still could not quite believe she'd actually done it. His wonder made him reckless. "Does this mean you've provided for the other deficiency as well?"

She looked at him quizzically, then sniffed in obvious boredom. "Oh, yes, the ascorbic acid," she says. "Today's rations have already been prepared. Deyos will have to implement the change tomorrow."

Julian glanced over his shoulder at the other Vorta, who was wearing a broad, unctuous, and completely disingenuous smile. " _Yes,_ Tiellyn, naturally," he said with poisoned deference. "Just as you say."

Unease squirmed beneath Julian's ribs, and he felt the need to ask for further assurances, but he knew it would not be wise. Tiellyn, after all, would be departing at some point — today, tomorrow, he did not know — but Deyos would remain. Julian looked between them, the female Vorta now disinterestedly issuing murmured instructions to her Jem'Hadar escort, and the male staring maliciously right into the human prisoner's soul, and drew in a deep breath.

"If it's all the same to you, I think I'll go now," he said tightly.

"Go where?" sneered Deyos, but he made no move to prevent Julian from walking away.

It took Julian a moment to find his friends amid the mass of bewildered prisoners, who did not seem to know whether to flee, or to wait to queue up for the meal. The inmates of Barracks 6 had backed up to the nearest pillar, and Tain was leaning heavily against it. The Breen had take Martok's place at Tain's left, and stood stoically immobile, permitting the Cardassian to grip their forearm as he stood with his head tipped back against the tritanium buttress. Kalenna was at his other side, bracing him up and watching his face with concern. Both the General and the Sub-Lieutenant stood at one remove, providing a tangible perimeter for others to skirt.

"We should get him back to bed," Julian said, unable to mask his concern. It was very difficult to gauge a Cardassian's condition by complexion, because the variations in the grey hue of their skin were so subtle, but he did not like the look of Tain's colour. His respiratory rhythm was too deliberate, too, as if he were compensating for something.

Kalenna nodded, and moved as if to guide the old man, but Tain shook his head fractionally. "Not yet," he said. Then, with almost convincing irritation, he added; "Stop tugging my arm, woman, and send your Romulan lackey to fetch the bottles. While I'm certainly not  _complaining_  about eating the good doctor's cold leftover glop, I'd like a full meal for once. As I'm out here already, I might as well stay."

The others all looked at Julian with varying degrees of skeptical concern. He pressed his own lips together, weighing the matter with care. On the one hand, further exertion was unwise. On the other, Tain couldn't keep surviving on the frugal portion of food they could smuggle in the foil wrapper. And all of them could do with a full water ration. Slowly, he nodded his agreement.

"All right," he said gravely. "But if you start to feel light-headed, or your breathing gets any worse…"

"Spare me your mothering, Doctor," Tain scoffed, but only as a matter of form. He was already relaxing noticeably against the wall, once more allowing Kalenna and the Breen to buoy him up. Parvok was already gone to round up the canteens, and Martok looked thoughtful. Julian did not know what could possibly be so captivating to the warrior until the klaxon sounded.

As soon as it did, the General strode right to the head of the line, shouldering aside those who were trying to get there first. He quelled two Cardassians with a glare, and bodily removed a Hunter who proved too slow to defer. The Jem'Hadar, true to form, did not seem inclined to intervene in the petty squabbles of their prisoners. As for the Vorta, they had already vanished.

When Martok had won the coveted spot at the head of the line, he nodded at Julian. Doing what he could to aid the Major and the Breen with Tain, he guided them to join Martok. Parvok, hastening with laden arms, joined them only a moment later. So they were the first to draw their rations, and the floor was clear as they cut across to their accustomed corner. Actually getting Tain down onto the floor was something of a challenge, but they managed it. Likewise, they contrived to get him up again afterward, though it took all four uninjured people to do it. But in the end, they returned to the barracks and got Tain to bed, and Julian had a little time to sit with his thoughts before he had to go out to do his duty at the edge of the ring.

 _(fade_ )

The food did Tain some good, and he was strong enough to stump down to the waste reclamation room before curfew. Though Julian woke more than once in the night to check on him, the Cardassian slept on uninterrupted. And when morning came, he rose — with aid but without fuss — for the count.

But it was a long count. Deyos was in a foul mood, and lingered over his morning ritual with spiteful resolve. The absence of any strange faces among the Jem'Hadar seemed to suggest Tiellyn and the supply ship were gone. Lest the camp commander should seek to avenge himself upon Julian for the Vorta doctor's slights, he had left Tain between Martok and the silent but ever-obliging Breen. He was back in his usual place at the end of the front row, just short of the lip of the lighted arena. Julian expected something, if only the usual taunting. But when Deyos reached him the first time, he simply walked on, counting off until two hundred twelve, when a Romulan's bloody lip drew his comment and proved such an enormous distraction that he "lost count" and had to begin again. On the second pass, too, he said nothing to or about Julian. On the third pass he moved on to the next pair as well — but he must have seen the look of puzzlement on the Starfleet officer's face, because at last he curled his bloodless lips into a lazy sneer.

"Why, Doctor," he cooed caustically. "Can it be you're  _disappointed_ to be overlooked today? You were happy enough to ignore me yesterday."

Julian couldn't recall ignoring the man, but he also knew better than to argue. He met Deyos's eyes steadily, his heart pounding in spite of his efforts to curb it. His physiological functions were increasingly unresponsive to his will, and Julian didn't know if that was another sign of creeping malnutrition, or if he was starting to lose the ability to focus. It felt that way, sometimes: as though his sanity was slowly slipping. He told himself that couldn't be the case. He was under stress, that was all. Exhausted. Distracted at every turn by some new struggle for survival — his own, or a patient's. He simply had to adapt or, failing that, hold out for the rescue that was surely now guaranteed to come.

"And you're doing it right  _now_!" Deyos drawled, striding back and stopping almost nose-to-nose with Julian. He dropped his voice to a dramatic stage whisper. "Don't worry, Doctor. You can't ignore me forever. Two!" he announced sharply, then started down the row again. "Four. Six…"

 _(fade_ )

When at last the count was over, the residents of Barracks 6 very nearly had to carry Tain back to his bed. Considering his size and their various limitations, Julian feared they might need to recruit outside aid. Yet somehow Tain kept his feet under him, though he could manage no more than a disorganized stumble, and by crowding around him the others managed to get him over the threshold, up the length of the room, and down onto his cot. There he lay, chest heaving and hitching, while Julian checked his pulse and listened to his heart and lungs, and tried to restrain the urge to curse Tiellyn's miserly cruelty in every language he knew. Here he was, doing everything he could think of to keep this ailing man alive, while she, who could have bought him time or even an outright cure with only a minor inconvenience, had refused to lift a finger. She called herself a doctor, but she was a monster, and Julian could not excuse such apathy for any reason, not even Dominion brainwashing.

Tain's heartbeat was slow, its rhythm gaping worryingly. The exertion of standing for the count had taken its toll, and the cold was doing the same.

"Blankets," Julian said as he straightened up, closing Tain's tunic and trying to bundle his jacket more snugly around him. "He needs them all, at least for now. Tain? Can you hear me?" There was no response but a sluggish lolling of the glazed, veiled eyes. Julian curled his hand around the Cardassian's and squeezed in what he hoped would be taken as reassurance. "Tain, we're going to try to warm you up. Stay with me, now. Keep breathing."

Kalenna and Parvok were stripping the beds, and Martok stood aside bearing solemn witness. When Julian had Tain bundled as warmly as possible, he felt his pulse again and then leaned low over him so that he knew he was in the man's range of vision. With his blood pressure as high as it felt, pounding against the wall of the temporal artery, Julian doubted Tain's visual acuity was at its peak. The room was probably a blur.

" _Tain_!" he said, firmly and considerably louder than would have in other circumstances. The pupils, comfortably dilated in this dim light as Garak's never were in the bright confluence of the Replimat, shrank slightly as the man brought Julian's face into focus. Intent upon his patient, he said; "How much pain are you in? Is there any numbness in your fingers? Pain in your jaw? Your back?"

"You…" Tain croaked. He seemed incapable of forming more than one syllable. His tongue flicked out over his lips, as chronically chapped as Julian's, and he made a low, gurgling sound somewhere deep behind his adenoids. Then he tried again, hoarsely. "Your questions are… tiresome, Doctor," he heaved laboriously. "Let me… rest…"

Julian could not shake the fear that if Tain fell asleep he might never wake up, but without instruments it was only that: a fear. All he could offer Tain was solicitude, monitoring, worry, and slumber. The monitoring was exhausting for both of them. Obviously, the Cardassian scorned worry and chafed beneath solicitude. That left only slumber.

"Fine," Julian said covering his defeat in a thin layer of annoyance; less alarming and more culturally appropriate. "But I'll be taking your vitals again in a couple of hours."

"Do what you must, Doctor," Tain mumbled, but he was already slipping into the merciful fog of sleep.

 _(fade_ )

He was still asleep — and still breathing — two hours later when Julian checked on him before mustering out for ration call. No one asked if Tain should be roused for it: everyone understood without being told that it was out of the question today. Julian gathered his canteens and drank the last of his water ration, wearily grateful he had been able to drink his full two litres today and trying not to think too wistfully of the libation he and the others would have to give to Tain. Then he followed Martok and the Breen out into the atrium, where the rest of the prisoners were waiting for the signal to form the line. Julian halted just past the pillars, however, frozen with dread at an unexpected incongruity.

Deyos stood at the mouth of the alcove where the meals were dished up off of the defunct ore conveyor.

The Vorta never deigned to supervise mealtimes. It was a chore for the Jem'Hadar, and Julian could well imagine the disdain Deyos felt for the task. It did not offer him much by way of scope to torment the prisoners: the bland monotony of the tasteless grey mush was torment enough and numbed them to everything else. Every day it was a struggle to force the stuff down, despite the constant hunger, and the temptation to fantasize about the vast variety of flavours, textures, and nutrients in the worlds and lives the prisoners had been stolen from was cruelly constant. What was the point of the Vorta abandoning the relative warmth and privacy of his room just to prod at spirits too beaten down for him to give him any sport?

Deyos's cold and calculating expression morphed into a chilling smile. "Ah, Doctor! So good of you to join us!" he called. Julian's heart was in his throat. "Prisoners! Attention!"

He didn't need to call for it: they were all watching him anyway, only the occasional murmur or wheeze coming from the cold-ravaged Cardassians to break the wary silence. Even the Jem'Hadar on guard duty were watching him from the corners of their eyes, as cognizant as Julian was of the deviation from custom.

"The Dominion in its mercy does not simply execute its enemies," Deyos declaimed. "Instead, we house you. We feed you. We provide the means for you to keep from living in your own filth like the barbarians so many of you are."

That was a matter of interpretation, Julian thought sourly. The question of whether this treatment could be deemed  _merciful_  aside, every prisoner in this camp was living in their own filth to one degree or another. Deyos meant they were provided with toilet facilities, but that was the absolute barest minimum required for healthful hygiene. Julian's scalp began to itch intolerably again, and the rash in his axillae and his inguinal area stung. His best efforts to keep clean with the scant means available had accomplished little by way of comfort, and were not even enough, it seemed, to maintain skin health and integrity. The opportunity to launder clothing might have been a start…

"You are not expected to earn your daily allotment of food and water. You are not put to work as slaves. You provide nothing to the Dominion; you only consume. And yet, it seems there are those among you who are  _ungrateful_ ," Deyos clucked regretfully. "Who have the audacity to criticize what you are given — freely and without expectation of anything in return. Who claim the food you are given is inadequate, lacking in nutrients,  _slop_!"

He fixed his eyes on Julian as he said this last, and the Doctor felt his flesh crawling with more than accumulated sweat and grime. He had known yesterday that it was a gamble to entrust Deyos to provide the supplementation Tiellyn had promised. But now in addition to the senseless disappointment he should have been too cynical by now to feel, he felt a dawning, awful dread. Julian thought he knew what was coming, but he did not want to believe anyone could be so cruel, so vicious as to punish two hundred people for the insolence of one.

"Therefore from today, all rations shall be reduced by half!" Deyos proclaimed triumphantly. "For the glory of the Dominion!"

There was a collective noise of alarm, and a few voices yelped half-formed protests before Deyos sliced an arm through the air for silence, and the Jem'Hadar behind him and at posts throughout the atrium raised their plasma rifles to their shoulders. The cries were bit off. The shuffling ceased.

Deyos was smiling enormously.

"Before you complain, to me or to the guards, remember that it is at the Dominion's pleasure that you are fed at all, or provided with water. Or air, for that matter. Or shelter from the vacuum of space. Remember you are not entitled to any of it, not even your own pitiable little lives, and be grateful for what you have."

He sneered at them all, turning his head as slowly as a drunken serpent, savouring the terror and dismay on the gaunty, grubby faces.

"And when your bellies begin to ache, and you feel the need to thank someone for your lot," he said; "you can thank our dear Starfleet doctor, and his pretty little speech about copper and Vitamin C."

With a final, vitriolic smile aimed directly at Julian's wide, horrified eyes, Deyos turned heel and strode away, down the length of the atrium towards the administration pod.

 _(fade_ )


	69. The Federation Idealist

_Note: I've been grappling with my disease the last few weeks, and writing has slowed to a crawl. "Cruel Are the Times" is benefitting from the fact that much of it was already written, while "The Viewless Winds" used up its cache of extra chapters long ago. I apologize for the slow updates. Thank you all so much for continuing to read, and to wait so patiently! Your encouragement means the world to me._

_[The second part of the note is more relevant to my readers on fanfiction.net, many of whom have not yet seen DS9. I'm leaving it here because it's still true for all of us, even if it's not news.]_

_Also, if any of you are getting intolerably curious about Julian's repeated references to the year 2024 and Sanctuary District A, the source of those allusions is "Past Tense", Episodes 3.11 and 3.12. In 2017, "The Atlantic" rightly called it "[Star Trek's Most Political Episode](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/star-trek-deep-space-nine-past-tense/542280/)", and it is also without question one of the best — not just of "Deep Space Nine", but of all Trek. If you have an hour and a half to spare, I highly recommend it. The march of time — and geopolitics — has only enriched it._

**Part XII, Act IV: The Federation Idealist**

No one moved until Deyos was out of sight. Then, it seemed, everyone did. Feet shuffled and shoulders turned. All eyes pivoted slowly to Julian where he stood, dumbstruck and dismayed, near the ring.

The depths of the Vorta's cruelty should not have been a surprise. Yet that he would starve every prisoner on this rock simply to exact his revenge upon one man was so unjust that it left Julian stunned. He was excruciatingly conscious of the sea of staring faces, but he could not make sense of what they wanted from him.

There was motion at his right side: a solid, broad figure stepping into his periphery. General Martok eased his left arm free of its supporting strap, and flexed eight fingers. "I will defend you to the last, Doctor," he murmured, his voice a low growl. "We are outnumbered, but they will pay dearly when they come for you."

It was only then that Julian comprehended Deyos's other aim. By placing the blame for the reduction in rations firmly on the Starfleet officer's head, Deyos had made him a target for the others' frustration and despair. He had proved unable to break Julian, and there was a limit to the physical damage he could inflict without running afoul of Tiellyn. He was counting on the other prisoners to take care of both.

Now, Julian could see not just shock and dread in the eyes locked upon him from every side. He saw rage and resentment as well. The Federation doctor and his meddling: he had mystified them all at first, and then they'd learned to tolerate him. But now he'd cost them something no one in this hellhole could spare. They might not descend on him in a swarm right now, with the Jem'Hadar so near at hand and the meal-call imminent. But they'd find opportunities to exact their revenge soon enough. How had Deyos put it? _When your bellies begin to ache, and you feel the need to thank someone for your lot…_

Julian Bashir was a marked man.

The bleat of the klaxon almost startled Julian out of his skin. He knew the reflex was visible, and he knew that was unwise, but he could not prevent it. At his side, Martok remained as still and stalwart as a sentry of old, his whole body taut with readiness. A few prisoners turned away, trudging into formation to receive what little food the Vorta would allow them. Most still watched Julian as if expecting something. What? Flight? A speech? An apology? He didn't know.

"Prisoners! Assume formation for ration call," Ikat'ika commanded in his harsh, stentorian way. No one dared to disobey that tone of voice, whatever they might want to do to the meddling human. The line formed rapidly.

Julian glanced at Martok, who nodded once, rigidly. The General squatted swiftly to collect the bottles Julian hadn't seen him set down next to his boot, and he tucked them into the crook of his left arm so that his right was still free to defend his friend. They moved to join the other prisoners, Martok leading the way. A Cardassian who yielded for the warrior stepped in again just rapidly enough to jostle Julian's shoulder with deliberate menace: when Julian met his eyes in shock, he glared.

Then someone stepped up behind him. Julian heard the motion, felt the change in air pressure as the body stopped just short of his, and sense immovable purpose. Instinct froze his blood and tried to freeze his limbs, but his training told him that keeping his back turned to an obvious threat was foolhardy and unacceptable. As the line nudged forward, Julian screwed taut his courage and turned.

He found himself looking into the blank, smokey slit of the Breen's helmet. They had stepped up behind him, and as Julian stared, they raised one arm, outstretched with the smooth precision of an automaton, to provide a barrier between the human and a sullen-looking Romulan from Barracks 17. The man stepped automatically aside, skirting Julian instead of slamming into him. When he was past, the Breen lowered their gauntleted arm.

"Do you…" Julian began flimsily, then stopped. Even if the Breen could understand the question — which he doubted — they couldn't offer him an answer. Slumping a little in frustration, he murmured; "Thank you."

"Doctor…" Martok murmured. Julian turned to see the line had moved ahead. He shuffled up, still wondering.

Did the Breen understand the Vorta's language? Did they know what had happened? Or were they merely responding to the visual cues: the other prisoners' sudden hostility, the Cardassian's move of physical dominance, Martok's defensive stance? Would they regret their act of solidarity in a few minutes, when they got to the front of the line and saw what was happening? Would they understand that Julian was to blame?

From up ahead, someone raised a voice in startled protest, only to be silenced by a low, threatening snarl from one of the guards. The line inched up, and finally it was Martok's turn to lay down his canteens. At the next station on the conveyor, where ordinarily the water bottles were lined up in neat rows for prisoners to take, the Jem'Hadar stood behind an empty space. At his side, stacked on one of the cargo crates, was a far smaller selection of bottles than usual. Julian glanced down the line behind him to take stock of the prisoners who had not yet drawn their share, uneasy certainty crawling up from his bowels.

The guard took one canteen and thrust it into Martok's waiting hand. The General cast him a very black look and moved on, but Julian was not so prudent.

"The water, too?" he protested, hurriedly setting down his own empty bottles and looking from one grey, craggy face to the next. "You can't—"

"Orders from the Vorta," the nearest guard said rigidly. "From today, all rations shall be reduced by half."

"You don't understand!" Julian gasped. "Deyos… does he have any idea what he's doing? Two litres of water isn't enough as it is. To reduce it by half…"

He knew he sounded frantic, perhaps even deranged, but he couldn't do anything about that. The horror of this prospect and the injustice of it were completely overpowering. Wild, addled thoughts careened through his mind. He hadn't complained about the water ration to Tiellyn. He _hadn't_. He knew he hadn't. The quantity and quality of the food, yes. The nutritional deficits, certainly. But not the water…

Or had he? For a brief, panicked second, Julian honestly didn't know. He'd been vaguely aware for weeks that his mind was growing addled, his focus less reliable. Was it possible he'd said something to Tiellyn that he didn't remember.

"Move on, prisoner, or you will be disciplined!" the Jem'Hadar snapped.

Julian's eyes were wide and wild. "But— the water…"

Suddenly he felt a hand in the small of his back, firm but not brutal, nudging him forward to the next station. Julian glanced back, fearful and confused, and once again saw the strangely soothing blankness of the tan-coloured helmet. Understanding what they were trying to convey to him, Julian shuffled forward and took the single bottle offered to him. It was achingly cold against his already chilled palm, and the joints of his fingers began to burn miserably. He wanted to continue to argue, but he knew he could not. The guards would not tolerate a lecture from a malcontent, and it wouldn't change anything: the Jem'Hadar had no authority to alter the rations, anyhow.

There was a cruel irony to the fact that Julian would probably find a beating at the hands of the soldiers less lethal than the beating that was waiting for him whenever the other prisoners managed to get him cornered. He didn't doubt Martok's pledge to fight to the last in his defence, but what could one Klingon — even so valiant and determined a Klingon — do against a mob of dozens? If Martok insisted upon defending him, Julian's interference with regard to the nutritional deficits in the rations might get both of them killed.

He reached the last station and picked up a dented tin plate from the pile. He held it out, and Arat'zuma scooped a meagre portion of mush from the shallow serving trough. It squelched unpleasantly and began at once to ooze towards the edges of the dish. Julian stared at it, weighing it with eyes and hand. A little more than a quarter of a kilogram. Insufficient if it had been one meal out of three. Woefully, dangerously inadequate now.

"Keep your complaints to yourself," someone muttered. It took Julian a moment to realize it was the Jem'Hadar soldier. Arat'zuma, who prepared the daily meal for the prisoners. Whose crushed hand Julian had painstakingly and discreetly repaired. He shifted his eyes away as soon as Julian met them, face and stance both unreadable. "It is a trap. Complaining about the rations is forbidden. Move on, and be silent."

Julian stared at him, but only for a moment. Arat'zuma wasn't the only one urging him to move: the Breen was nudging him again. He stepped out of the line, and they held out their hand for the cylinder of nutrient gel they were issued each day. That, at least, did not appear to have been tampered with: it was a sealed, single-use container, either replicated or manufactured rather than prepared in a daily batch. As Julian moved to join Martok and the two Romulans in their usual corner, the Breen stopped just clear of the queue to insert the head of the tube into the appropriate flange of their environmental suit.

"Not there, Doctor," Martok muttered when Julian moved to take his usual place against the wall. He nodded to the place where the two bulkheads met; the place where Tain usually sat; the most defensible position in the feeding area. With a small, unsteady nod, Julian stepped over Parvok's outstretched leg and slid down the wall.

He looked at his friends, each already intent upon their pitiful meal. Julian did not know what to say, so he dredged up the hollow all-purpose platitude that his species was widely believed to overuse to a fault.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, staring down into his lap.

"For what?"

To Julian's astonishment, it was Parvok who spoke. He looked up at the Sub-Lieutenant, too bewildered to sink any deeper into despair. "For… for getting the rations cut," he stammered.

Parvok licked a glob of glutinous grain from his fingertips and shook his head. "The Vorta cut the rations," he said flatly. "Not you."

"Well, yes," said Julian, trying to keep from wandering down the perilous lane of speculation that lay beyond the question of what _he_ would do if he were the one responsible for the feeding of the prison population. Even with these sparse supplies, surely there was _something_ that could be done to provide nutritious and more palatable fare. "But he did it because of—"

"Because you tried to help us," Parvok said, his tone unchanged. "Because you _did_ help us, just as you said you would." His hand drifted from his plate to touch his shoulder, where Tiellyn had pressured in his dose of dicopper chloride. "We Romulans, at least. I'm already feeling stronger, Doctor. More alert. I can't be the only one."

Julian's mouth opened around the protest before he came to his senses. He hurriedly put two fingers between his teeth, with a small lump of stewed grain and legumes smeared across them. He took longer than necessary to remove his hand, and then to swallow, as he reminded himself to watch his tongue. He had almost brushed off Parvok's earnest assertion. What he was feeling was the placebo effect; it had to be. Copper supplements weren't like getting a hit of caffeine, or a unit of whole blood, or even the Vitamin C Julian's own body craved: the effect was not instantaneous. It took weeks for a Romulan body to produce mature green blood cells from the molecular building blocks they'd been provided today. The earliest Parvok could expect to start feeling stronger or more alert would be in about three weeks — say, fourteen Dominion Standard Days?

But it didn't matter. The placebo effect was a valid response, a means of relief even before a treatment could be said to be working in a medical sense. If it buoyed Parvok's spirits, made it easier for him to endure the daily miseries of the camp, or made the reduction in rations even a little more bearable, Julian was grateful. His father had loved to accuse him of being a smart-mouthed know-it-all, but over the years Julian had worked to curb that impulse. Sometimes, it was more important to be kind than to be right — something Richard Bashir had certainly never understood.

Julian forced a tiny smile at Parvok. "I'm glad," he said.

Kalenna broke from her wary surveillance of their neighbours to look at him. "You did well, Doctor, and you did all you could. We bear you no ill will for this."

"I have told you," Martok grunted, scooping up the last of his starvation ration and swallowing it swiftly. "It is the Vorta's work, and the Vorta's dishonour. You cannot be held responsible. Not by us, and not in your own heart."

Julian wished he could convince himself of that. He looked down at his plate with its misshapen, slowly spreading lump of greyish glop. Despite his constant, gnawing hunger, he felt nauseous and quite unable to take another mouthful. And then he remembered his other patient, waiting back in the barracks. He slipped his hand into his right sleeve and drew the foil pouch from his cuff. Carefully, resolutely, he filled it to capacity. Before, it had taken a third of his daily ration to do so. Now, it held two-thirds, and he was left with a sorry looking smear weighing only about eighty-five grams.

He handed the pouch off to Parvok, who concealed it carefully in his more voluminous tunic, and Julian force himself to choke down what remained of his ration. His stomach churned and begged for more, even as his throat tried to close against the rancid-tasting mush and the knowledge of what his foolhardy hope of winning better treatment had cost them all.

At last the guards gave the order to rise and disperse. Today, no one was obliged to hasten through their last morsels: everyone had finished their meals and licked their plates clean long ago. Kalenna gathered the dishes, and Parvok slipped off to take the food to Tain. Julian moved to follow, but Martok caught his arm with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. He shook his head slowly.

"Wait."

Julian frowned at him, uncomprehending. Surely it was better to leave now, in the general chaos, rather than to hang back and leave time for someone lay out an ambush. But he was not about to question the General's strategy just because he couldn't understand it. Julian had been given his share of tactical training, but it wasn't the equal of Martok's — and he had two years' familiarity with the place and the people that Julian lacked. So he did as he was told, and waited while most of the other prisoners filed out. Kalenna left swiftly after turning in the plates. The Breen remained, standing motionless and unreadable near Julian's other shoulder.

At last, the Jem'Hadar began to shove the closest dawdlers towards the mouth of the alcove.

"Follow," muttered Martok, watchful and ready to spring into action. "Stay near."

Julian nodded and obeyed. The Breen took up the rearguard position, either out of awareness or because it was natural to continue to walk in file. Martok chose his approach carefully, and they were out of easy reach of the guards when they passed the choke point. They stepped out into the broad expanse of the atrium unmolested, and Julian assessed their surroundings. More than the usual number of prisoners were lingering, in knots and bunches as far from the sentries as possible. Some were pacing, trying to warm up a little in the merciless chill. Most, though, were watching the throat of feeding area.

Someone shifted, taking a couple of steps for a reason Julian couldn't identify out of the corner of his eye. By the time he looked, the Cardassian in question had stopped dead in his tracks, petrified beneath General Martok's monocular glare. A low, almost inaudible rumble eerily like a growl sounded deep in the Klingon warrior's chest. He was bristling with battle-readiness.

Julian's eyes, however, travelled to the shadow of one of the ribs that supported the dome. In its shadow stood Kalenna, talking intently to Sub-Commander Darok. She must have been whispering very quietly indeed, because Julian couldn't catch even the faintest sound of her voice — distinct among the many men because of its pitch. She finished speaking and Darok murmured something in return. Then he nodded once, sharply, and started across the atrium towards the Klingon and the human.

Julian tried to prepare himself. He didn't think he had anything to fear from Darok, and not merely because Kalenna had surely filled him in on the truth of the situation. He doubted that Parvok was the only Romulan in the camp who was feeling better, emotionally if not physically, for the simple care he had won them. Nevertheless, this was bound to be an uncomfortable conversation, and he had to compose himself for it.

Then someone stepped out of the fragmented crowd to intercept Darok. It was Gul Nador. He laid a staying hand on the Romulan's quilted sleeve and muttered something. Darok's lips thinned, but he did not argue.

A moment later Nador, who owed Julian nothing, fixed flinty eyes upon him and changed course to approach.

Martok took a step forward, teeth bared and sound arm ready. Julian swallowed hard, driving back his fear. At his shoulder, the Breen stood like a dun-coloured statue, only the faint hiss of their respiration apparatus giving any sign of life.

"Stand aside, General: I only want a word with him," Nador said coolly. Now that he was nearer, Julian could see the discolouration of the scales on his neck ridges, the peeling undersides that were the mark of _terat rol_. And he could see the slight off-kilter syncopation of the nictitating membranes that did not quite move with his opaque outer eyelids. The chill was affecting him more than his confident stride suggested.

"How can I help you, Gul?" Julian said, as levelly as he could.

"Apparently you cannot," Nador muttered. His voice was pitched deliberately low, and Julian found himself straining to listen. "This business with the rations: tell me why the Vorta claims you are the one to thank. Because of the injections for the Romulans?"

"Partly," Julian said. His lips scarcely moved. They were numb. Martok was ready to spring to his defence, but if there was any way — any way at all — to keep his valiant and noble companion from embroiling himself in this, Julian had to try.

"And the other? The vitamin that would cure _terat rol_. You asked for that as well?" Nador pressed.

Julian nodded miserably. "It couldn't be given as a depot like the copper could. We need a daily dose, all of us. Not much… even humans need less than fifty milligrams, and I seem to be showing symptoms of deficiency sooner than anyone else did. But it has to be taken routinely. In the food."

"And the Vorta misconstrued that as a complaint about the rations," Nador spat bitterly. He rolled his eyes expansively, in a way that reminded Julian of Garak. Sometimes, watching his friend the tailor-spy execute that expression, Julian thought Cardassians had evolved those bony supraorbital ridges to keep their eyeballs from dislocating when they did it. This wasn't the moment for a sarcastic little giggle, but one very nearly found its way to his lips nonetheless, borne up on the helium of overwrought nerves.

"You got off lightly," Nador hissed, his voice dropping lower still. "A half-ration is miserable, but the alternative would be worse."

"Worse for everyone?" Julian asked.

Nador frowned at him, uncomprending. Then he shook his head in what was almost a shudder, and spun around. He took two backward steps that brought him elbow-to-elbow with Julian, and then raised his hand to clap the dingy, discoloured blue band that wrapped Julian's shoulders.

"Cardassians!" he proclaimed, in a voice that carried to the far reaches of the arena and to the apex of the dome before echoing back. "The Starfleet officer is known to us all. He has walked among us. He has been in each barracks. He has asked questions, and you have answered him: because the questions he asks are in your own best interests. In the best interests of every Cardassian in this prison."

Julian watched as faces slack with cold-induced stupor animated slowly with wary interest, and as numb eyes glinted ever so faintly. From the Cardassians, he studied the puzzled Romulans. And then the faces of the Jem'Hadar guards: alert, faintly perplexed, but studious rather than reactionary. The plasma rifles remained at low ready, at least for now. The Dominion's soldiers were curious, as surprised at this turn of events as any of the prisoners.

"You know this man!" Nador said, giving Julian's shoulder one firm shake. Martok's nostrils flared, but he did not move to interfere. Julian shifted his free hand subtly so that his fingertips brushed the warrior's sleeve. He hoped he could telegraph his wishes that way. Martok had to stand fast, and to allow Nador his words. "Many of us have had dealings with Starfleet. Few of us have known the work of their doctors, until he came to this place."

He took another ponderous pause. The Cardassian style of public speaking was stately and dramatic, with bold declarations and stirring rhetoric forming the backbone of a propagandist's toolchest. Nador wasn't the most compelling Cardassian speechcrafter Julian had ever listened to — that honour probably went to Dukat — but he knew what he was doing. His compatriots were all listening raptly, as they had probably been conditioned from childhood to do.

"And you know the Vorta!" proclaimed Nador. "Which of these do you think you have to thank for the fact your bellies are half full? I will not decide for you. Decide for yourselves. But this I know: this man has attempted to help us all. He labours to keep us strong. Strong enough to resist in the ring. Strong enough to stand for the count. Strong enough to survive in hope, until we can be reunited with our families! The Jem'Hadar have told us there is no escape but death, but I tell you: if we survive, it is not to live out all our lives upon this asteroid. We will see Cardassia again! But only if we are _strong_. Only if we are _undivided_. Cardassian. Romulan. Human. We must be undivided, and we shall return home. This I vow!" His voice rose almost to a battle cry. "With my life's blood. For my sons. For all our sons!"

Then he fell silent, the words of the traditional pledge resounding for a moment on the icy air. Julian knew them better than he'd like to: they had been repeated by character after character in generation after doomed generation in _The Never-Ending Sacrifice_ — which Garak had insisted was one of the greatest works of fiction his culture had ever produced. The repetitive epic might be the highest form of Cardassian literature, but Julian had found it discouraging and damnably depressing. He did not much want to be reminded of it now.

But Nador's words had be anything but discouraging, and about as far from depressing as it was possible for anything to be here. He hadn't quite called for a prisoners' revolt — which was probably why the watching Jem'Hadar had not silenced him with a blast from one of the rifles — but he was certainly calling for defiance. Hope was the greatest defiance anyone could muster against this kind of heavy-handed authority, and Julian was swayed by Nador's.

The Gul gave Julian one last look, and then walked away without a word. He strode down towards the far end of the atrium, near the administration pod, and started pacing, swinging his arms to generate more metabolic warmth. Several of the Cardassians took the cue to begin doing the same. Others were staring at Julian or at their _de facto_ commander with idle, half-drunken puzzlement. The Romulans looked sceptical and uneasy, and most of them were watching Darok instead. It was his move, Julian realized, and he watched as the Sub-Commander approached.

Darok did not say a word. He looked first to the right and then to the left, studying the position of the Jem'Hadar soldiers. Then he locked his startlingly green eyes upon Martok's lone one. "Will you stop me, Klingon?" he asked.

Martok's lips curled back a little farther, like a hound at heel waiting only for the leash to slip so he could spring. But his eye sought out Kalenna, standing about fifteen metres behind Darok. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, and the General growled deep in his throat.

"Only if you give me cause, Romulan," he warned.

Darok nodded slightly, faintly contemptuous. He raised his right hand, thumb and last two fingers curled, index and middle extended in tight parallel. He reached out with deliberate slowness and touched the tips of the two fingers to Julian's left cheek, just above the prominence of his mandible.

The contact lasted only a second. Darok was already turning on one heel when his hand withdrew. He walked away, head held high, and cast one cold, disdainful look at Ikat'ika as he went. Almost to a man, the other Romulans also looked away, scattering to be about their afternoon's meagre business, whatever it might be.

No one came towards Julian, Martok, and the Breen. No one made any threatening sign, or whispered a malediction. One Hunter, greenish face pallid with hunger and inaction, was glaring at him from near the ring, but he did not move. Julian felt the wary tension ebbing from his limbs, and with it much of his inadequate energy. He felt himself slump.

"What was that?" he asked no one in particular.

Kalenna was only an armspan away all of a sudden, though he hadn't seen her move. His powers of observation seemed to be lacking a great deal these days. She glanced back over her shoulder in the direction Darok had gone.

"If he were a human, he would have marked you with a kiss, I believe? A sign of solidarity and truce?" she said, eyebrow arched.

Julian shook his head, baffled. "Eight hundred years ago, maybe," he said. But he thought she understood what she was saying. "You mean that was his equivalent of Nador's speech?"

Kalenna nodded. "He didn't need words, because we're all bearing the strongest argument in your favour in our arms right now," she said. "But in his clumsier way, Nador has also made his wishes known. They can't promise you're untouchable, Doctor, but I don't think you can expect a concerted attack. Everyone knows the Vorta bears the blame. Punishing you would only satisfy Deyos, and no one is willing to risk _that_."

She took his arm, cupping a gentle hand on his elbow. "I think it's safe to return to the barracks," she said. "You can check on Tain, and perhaps rest a while before the fight in the ring. I think you've earned it."

 _(fade_ )

Julian lay down for an hour, after reassuring himself the elderly Cardassian was still stable, but he didn't really rest. His mind was whirring, and he couldn't quite make sense of everything he was thinking, much less feeling.

When he had first awakened in this prison, even his cellmates had been scornful of his Federation philosophy and his Starfleet ideals. They had mocked him with varying degrees of malice, from Kalenna's rueful teasing to whatever Tain's grandfatherly-flavoured venom could be best described as. Even Martok, who had been a Federation ally all his life, had been mystified. To the prisoners beyond Barracks 6, he had been alternately a joke, an irritant, a danger, and an object of contempt. He hadn't let that faze him, and he hadn't let it alter his behaviour. He had gone right on, day after day and week after week, offering his aid to the victims in the ring, doing what he could for everyone around him, and sticking to his ideals even when they seemed likely to get him killed.

The nutritional study hadn't altered his methods, but it had brought them into every barracks in the camp. It had brought him into close contact with almost every prisoner. Nador had spoken of questions, but questions were only part of it. He hadn't just asked, he had listened to the answers. He had given each Romulan, each Cardassian, each Gamma Quadrant citizen in the place individual attention and care, a chance to feel, if only for a short time, that they were the most important person in his focus. By doing that, he had restored to each of them some small part of their individuality and their identity — a part the Dominion could not take away. Julian knew what it did to a person's self-image to be listened to, _really_ listened to. It was maybe a little arrogant to say that was transformative… but in a tangible way, it _was_.

And what was the result? Doctor Julian Bashir of Starfleet had built up social capital for himself. He hadn't intended to do so: that hadn't been the goal. But it had been the result. Even the Cardassians, who mistrusted their own physicians and medics, had found themselves compelled to trust him, at least far enough to admit to the humiliating symptoms of a disease they associated with want and poverty and personal failure. That trust had not been broken, as Deyos had hoped, by the Vorta's cruel edict today. It had been tested — and it had held.

The incontrovertible conclusion before him was this: his Federation ideals were not only worthy, but contagious. By living resolutely within the system he'd grown up amidst, by insisting even here that it was feasible and sustainable, Julian had _made_ it feasible. He had, without consciously meaning to, induced those around him to buy into one small part of that philosophy: the idea that if you treated others as you wanted to be treated, sooner or later they would mirror that behaviour and treat you in kind. They could have turned on him today. They hadn't. They had rejected the cutthroat option, the vindictive path Deyos had expected them to take. And they'd decided instead that Julian was a part of their community, worthy of respect and protection even when it cost them all.

In the battle between the Dominion cynic and the Federation idealist, the Federation idealist had won. A question that had plagued Julian's heart for years — ever since that first awful night in Sanctuary District A — was answered. Even when frightened, desperate, humiliated, starved, cut off from friends and resources and support, it _was_ possible to cling to those ideals, to uphold them, and to refuse to be ground down into savagery. Not only that, but they could still flourish. Still grow. Still spread.

Tears pricked in Julian's eyes as he stared up at the bare, bolted tritanium ceiling. They were tears of wonder and frantic hope. He blinked them resolutely away, because he didn't have time to celebrate this victory, as profound and as personal as it was. There was still work to do, another battle to fight, another demonstration of his Federation ideals to be made. He could not make it until morning, and he suspected he'd need the rest of the day and the whole long, bitterly cold night to work up the courage to do it.

But he was damned well going to manage it somehow.

 _(fade_ )


	70. Into the Dark

**Act XII, Part V: Into the Dark**

Julian was just starting to contemplate getting up again, so that he could take his place near the ring, when he became aware he was being watched. He turned his head into the bare mattress, missing the meagre pillow that was now propping up Tain's heavy head, and saw Parvok standing by the bench. Atop it in a neat row stood five canteens, and the Romulan held a sixth.

"I do not wish to disturb your rest, Doctor," Parvok said flatly; "but isn't it time to divide up the ration?" He seemed about to say more, thought better of it, closed his mouth, and then sighed before deciding to go ahead anyway. "I want to take a drink, but until he—" He nodded resentfully over his shoulder towards Tain. "—has been given a share, that would complicate matters."

Julian rolled onto an elbow and sat up. He rubbed the back of his neck. "You want to ensure Tain gets a fair share of the water?"

"It's not a question of what I want," Parvok muttered blackly. "It's a question of what's been agreed."

Julian didn't argue, nor did he ask why dividing the ration was apparently his responsibility. He and Kalenna generally took it in turns, it was true, and the Major was nowhere to be seen. For whatever reason, Parvok didn't want to take the initiative — but even the fact that he'd considered the need to divide the ration before taking a drink was remarkable. More remarkable, in fact, than his attitude towards Deyos's new edict. Parvok had softened towards Julian over these miserable weeks. He had not (understandably enough!) done the same with Tain.

Julian worked quickly, equalizing the level in each of the six bottles. He tried not to run the numbers, but he couldn't help it: his mind completed the simple equation in a neural instant. Eight hundred thirty-three millilitres per person, give or take a little. Twenty-six millilitres per hour. It wouldn't prove deadly today, but how long could any of them sustain that sort of dehydration?

If Deyos could not be persuaded to relent, Julian was going to have another comparative study on his hands, and the results would be horrifying. He probably wouldn't last long enough to bear witness to them all: the Romulans would survive longest on the reduced ration, and the Cardassians would endure better than a human. He wasn't certain about the various Gamma Quadrant prisoners, but of the inmates of Barracks 6, he and Martok would be the two racing each other towards delirium and organ failure. Assuming, of course, that Enabran Tain did not die first, his already overtaxed body unable to compensate for the deficit.

Julian gave Parvok his bottle, and went to check on his patient. The aged Cardassian appeared to be sleeping, but as Julian tucked the canteen between his hip and the wall, Tain's lips twitched.

"Off to play the fool for the Jem'hadar?" he asked, his voice gravelly and far too weak. "They laugh at you, you know: the madman who patches up their prey day after day."

"You'll have to try harder than that if you want to make me feel like an idiot, Tain," Julian said. He had meant the words to come out impudent and playful, because he knew that was what his patient wanted and what would best serve to lift Tain's spirits. But looking at the suffering, barely conscious man before him, he could not manage it. A wry, sad note was what he struck instead, but he pressed on with his retort all the same. "I'm not sure I've ever seen a Jem'Hadar soldier laugh at _anything_ , much less the antics of a human."

Tain made a sound that might have been a chuckle or a scoff. "True," he huffed. "They're a joyless bunch, I'll give them that."

"Do you need anything?" Julian asked. "Before I go out to play the fool?"

There was no sting at all to Tain's words, even on Julian's own tongue. That surprised him: he'd expected them to be more painful on second hearing. But then, hadn't his folly proved its worth this morning? It seemed he was still floating on that cloud of uplifting vindication.

Tain groped down towards his hip, feeling for the bottle. He picked it up and shook it, gauging the fullness. "Where's the other one?" he asked.

Julian did not have the will to dissemble. "It's empty," he said. "The Vorta issued a half ration today."

He stole a glance at Parvok, tearing his eyes away from Tain's reaction to the news. The Sub-Lieutenant was just lowering his own canteen from his lips, and he looked irrationally guilty. Julian forced himself to look back at his patient, who was now frowning up at him in perplexity.

"A half ration," he repeated flatly.

Julian nodded.

Tain's eyes narrowed suspiciously. " _Why?_ "

Julian's mouth felt like he had been gorging on sandpeas. The Cardassian would be furious when he learned why the rations had been cut. It wasn't his wrath Julian feared, but the physiological consequences of it. Tain was too weak to harm anyone, but he was also too weak to endure the rigours of a tirade. His last fit of strong emotion — exhultation and the glee of vengeance, that time, following his threat to expose Julian for what he was — had precipitated a cardiac episode. He was in no condition to take on the spike in blood pressure, the altered pulse, the force of a lecture, or any of the other reflexes that would overtake him as he lambasted Julian for his folly in bringing the results of his study to the attention of the two Vorta.

"Why does Deyos do anything?" Parvok said bitterly, stepping into the void left by Julian's indecision. "Because it delights him to watch our suffering."

Tain grunted bitterly. "Suffering is a good deal more enjoyable to watch than to experience," he agreed, sounding like a connoseur weighing the merits of two different genres of music. "I'd like to have my turn with that Vorta."

"Delightful," Julian said dryly. "It's a well-known fact that two wrongs make a right."

"That it's wrong is merely a matter of opinion, Doctor," lectured Tain. "The Vorta doesn't think it wrong to cut our rations. I don't think it wrong to dream of flaying that sallow skin off his body strip by delicate strip while he writhes and pleads for mercy. And _you_ don't think it's wrong to go out there and take a chance you might have to patch up one of the Jem'Hadar as well as whatever unfortunate they put in the ring to fight for his life. We all have our idosyncracies."

Julian knew this was a pointless argument. He might have drawn it out for a little while for his patient's sake, knowing how invigorating Tain found a good quarrel. But he didn't have the time.

"Yes, well, I'm going to go and indulge my idosyncracies now. I'll be back to check on you as soon as I'm able." To Parvok he added, sotto _voce_ as he passed; "If he takes a turn…"

The Romulan man nodded. "I'll find you," he promised.

Julian nodded. "Thank you," he murmured, and then left the barracks.

 _(fade_ )

He supposed he should have known that Tain would get the whole story out of the Sub-Lieutenant. Julian only hoped that the effort to hold out had not cost Parvok too dearly. But when he returned to Barracks 6 almost an hour later, having done what he could for the Hunter beaten to unconsciousness in the arena, Tain was sitting up on his cot, arms crossed over his still-broad chest, glaring watchfully at the door. His expression of Stygian condemnation darkened still further as his eyes focused on Julian's face.

"Because the Vorta delights to watch us suffer," he thundered, spitting each word. Tain the invalid was gone. This was Tain the terror of worlds. "Or rather, because Julian Subatoi Bashir cannot contrive to keep his damned mouth _shut_!"

From the opposite corner, Martok growled. "Careful, Cardassian," he warned. "Invalid or no, it is not the Doctor who should be watching his mouth."

Tain glanced in his direction with a disdainful sniff, wholly undaunted. Then he fixed his glare back on Julian. On his cot, Parvok was trying not to cower visibly, but the effort it cost him was obvious. The Breen was on their bunk, lying flat and motionless. There was no sign of Kalenna.

"Of all the idiotic things you've done, this is surely the worst!" Tain declared venomously. "What did you hope to accomplish, madman?"

Julian stepped calmly out of the way of the door, which slammed shut in its usual grinding way. It took a good deal of self-control to keep from tensing at the noise, but he managed it. "What you've been mocking me for failing to do for weeks, every time I went out to gather more data," he said. "Effect a change based on the results of my nutritional study."

"Well, you've certainly done _that!"_ Tain snorted. "How long before people start to starve? Or are we all simply going to shrivel up like a red leaf plant in the heat of high summer?"

Julian didn't have an adequate response to these questions, but he did his best. "I hope," he said, every word deliberate and firm; "that the punitive measure is temporary. In the meantime—"

"Oh, you _hope_!" scoffed Tain. "Well, everything's fine, then, isn't it? We haven't got enough water to keep a newly-hatched taspar alive, but you've got _hope_!"

Julian wanted to shoot a questioning glance at Parvok, but he knew better than to give Tain such a clear indication that his words bore particular significance. But he wondered: had the Sub-Lieutenant managed to keep the reduction to the food ration hidden from the cantankerous old man?

"Hope isn't all I've got," Julian said, a little more fiercely than he meant to. "The Romulan prisoners have all received a dose of a copper compound that will help to resolve their chronic anemia."

"Oh, the _Romulans_!" Tain wafted a disdainful hand. "Well, that certainly puts my mind at ease. And Sub-Commander Darok has given you his protection because of it, I hear."

Julian felt the blood drain from his face. So he'd gotten the whole story out of Parvok after all; and the reduction to the food ration was not the worst of it. Tain had never remarked upon Julian's association with the Romulan leader, but…

"Oh, yes, Doctor. I know." A slick, angular smile now twisted Tain's face. "I know everything. I know Darok endorsed your choice. I know the prisoners did not turn on you as they had every right to do. And I know about Gul Nador's little _speech_."

The will to argue was gone. All Julian wanted to do was sink down onto the nearest bench. He strove to stand fast instead, though his knees were trembling. He knew he could have done nothing differently. He knew Nador's support was likely all that had saved him — and faithful Martok — from a bloody brawl against superior numbers. But Tain intended to exact a fearful price for it.

"That's _right_!" the Cardassian snarled, heaving himself to his feet while the cot moaned its protest. Tain was not particularly tall, but his breadth and his stance, once he straightened limbs visibly stiffened from the protracted periods in bed, seemed to fill the narrow room. "I warned you, Doctor. And you should know that I always make good on my promises."

Julian did know: one thing Garak's sparse remarks about Enabran Tain left no room for was doubt about the man's formidable follow-through. In his lexicon, there was no such thing as an idle threat. He didn't need — didn't _want_ — the man to elucidate. But he was paralyzed and incapable of speech, and Tain was not yet satisfied.

"You're finished," he hissed. His voice began to build in volume and ferocity, like a mounting ion storm in the last moments before striking a helpless vessel. "Arrogant, audacious little upstart! You think you're untouchable, beyond reproach, above suspicion? Watch how quickly that changes: how quickly they turn on you. The Vorta can't get a nest of your enemies to devour you, but I'll have no difficulty accomplishing the same ends with your sanctimonious Federation friends, will I? You've seen for yourself the desolation Cardassia has wrought upon that pet world of yours? The strip-mines of the Glyrhond Peninsula will look like blossoming orchards next to the ruins of your once-prestigious career! I will destroy you, Doctor! You, and all you've worked for! I—I—I—"

He had been seething with menace, but abruptly Tain faltered. The brooding wrath melted from his features, replaced by startled confusion. He staggered forward, first one halting step and then another. His right hand drifted up towards his breastbone, clutching at the front of his tunic. Startled, searching eyes found Julian's and locked there, something akin to exasperation blending with an abrupt, voiceless plea. Then his knees crumpled beneath him and he fell.

Julian sprung into action, horror and dread forgotten. Tain's hateful words and bitter promises would return to haunt him; he didn't doubt that. But for now, they melted utterly from his mind as the harbinger of vengeance hit the floor and transformed instantly into a patient in need. Julian got a firm, crosswise grip on the rounded shoulders, and jerked his head towards the man's tangled feet.

"Help me," he commanded. "We need to roll him over. Tain? Hold on. Try to keep breathing. I've got you."

Parvok scrambled around the benches and squatted, grabbing hold of Tain's legs and helping Julian to turn him. Martok approached only near enough that he could see what was going on, and then stopped, watching grimly as Julian landmarked for a pulse and gauged the stuttered, strangled gasps that were all the Cardassian seemed able to manage. Tain's eyes were huge in their sunken orbits, groping the air above him and apparently unable to focus on any one thing. Julian adjusted his position, opening the man's collar as he prepared to do all he could to help him.

 _(fade_ )

There was little enough he could manage, ill-equipped as he was. Julian assessed the arrhythmia and coached Tain through a series of painful, exhausting Valsalva breaths. That eased the fibrillation, but did nothing for the respiratory distress or the pain that rapidly mounted to the threshold to activate the implant in Tain's postcentral gyrus. There had been a measure of doubt during previous episodes, but there was none now: Enabran Tain was in the middle of a myocardial infarction. Without instruments or medications or diagnostic equipment, all Julian could do was huddle there on the frigid stone floor, and try to coach his patient through as if his survival were guaranteed instead of, at best, a dizzy spin of the dabo wheel.

When at last Tain's breathing eased a little, his pulse was crawling and he was utterly spent. By then, Kalenna had returned to the barracks, and she helped Parvok and Julian transfer Tain to his cot. All through the long, empty afternoon and what passed for evening, Julian tended his patient, doing what little he could. He sponged away Tain's strain-born perspiration so that it did not chill him worse than the constant, grinding cold already had. He coaxed him to take periodic sips of water from the rapidly dwindling measure in his bottle. During the elderly man's brief periods of near-lucidity, Julian talked him through simple breathing exercises that did seem to regulate his heart rate a little. Diligently, with no care for his own weariness, or his near-constant shivering, or the gnawing in his all-but-empty stomach, Julian did his sworn duty.

His only break from Tain's bedside came just before curfew, when Martok touched his arm and reminded him that he had best see to his own needs before they were locked in for the night. Walking to the waste reclamation room at the end of the pod, Julian became suddenly acutely aware of how his back and limbs ached from crouching to tend Tain. While he waited his turn for a toilet, he kneaded his neck and shoulders and pondered impossible questions.

Had the transmission been picked up by the nearest listening post yet? If so, had the codes he'd shared with Tain — strictly speaking, a violation of his security clearance that Starfleet Intelligence would almost certainly frown upon — enabled their message to be filtered to the top of the priority queue? If the answer to both those questions was affirmative, then it probably was on its way to the array at the mouth of the Wormhole. From there, it was a short hop to Deep Space Nine. He wondered who would be the first person to see it. Jadzia? Commander Worf? One of the junior officers from their respective departments, in the quiet of a night watch?

Julian wondered idly if he could calculate the current time on the station, and then determined, bitterly, that it was impossible. What now seemed like an old resentment and a half-forgotten violation rose up again afresh: he had no idea how long he had been sedated after his abduction, en route from Meezan IV. It was a senseless thing to rage against now, when so many other problems were far more immediate. But there was something ghastly about being so far from home, imprisoned against his will, with no precise idea of how long he'd been away.

He took care of his miserably inadequate evening routine, sanitizing his hands and dreaming longingly of sonic showers and the steam bath in his quarters and handmade Bajoran soaps. He raked his fingers through his greasy hair, scratching the flaking scalp beneath — and then went back to clean his hands again because they were slick with gritty oils. Then he trudged back to the barracks, wishing dully that he could just sleep away some of the misery weighing him down.

That was impossible, of course. He was facing another vigil at Tain's bedside — possibly for many nights to come. As he stepped back into the familiar, stale-aired cell, Julian turned weary eyes on the supine mass of his patient.

"Doctor?" Kalenna was seated on her cot, Parvok standing over her on the right, and Martok on the left. Julian cleared the door and closed the little circle, nodding tired acknowledgment. "How grave is his condition?"

Her voice was low and circumspect. Even so, Julian stole a backward glance at Tain. He appeared to be unconscious, but it was difficult to be certain. The deep, rhythmic breathing normally associated with slumber was now a physiological impossibility for him. His right ventricle was at least partially paralyzed, if Julian's ears could be trusted. His lungs were not getting proper oxygenation. Still he seemed to be beyond hearing, and if he wasn't, he would have to exert an effort to make out their words. He had a right to know his situation if he wanted to, although it was the sort of prognosis Julian only shared if he was asked.

Thoughts of confidentiality flitted briefly through his mind. In an ordinary situation, it wouldn't be ethical to discuss Tain's health with third parties without the man's permission. But this was no ordinary situation. They weren't a bunch of unaffiliated persons sitting around a table at Quark's. They were serving officers in their respective organizations, and co-conspirators in a plot to subvert a common foe. The health and capabilities of each member of their group was information instrumental to the team. Julian had the same duty to report now that he would have had if he'd been surrounded by the senior staff of Deep Space Nine, with Miles or Odo lying on that cot.

"It's grave," he sighed. "He's dying. If I can get him to a medical facility, or into stasis, in time, he's not beyond saving. But if help doesn't come soon, he's doomed."

They all weighed his words. Crushing though they were, it eased the burden on Julian's heart to speak them. It was a daunting thing to bear sole responsibility for any life, and while he had certainly borne that yoke before, it was different now. Not only because of the lack of equipment, but because in any other circumstance he would have referred Tain to another doctor: someone free of the personal entanglements between them. Now that he had given voice to his clinical judgement, grim as it was, Julian no longer felt so terribly alone.

"How long?" asked Martok.

Julian shook his head. "I can't be certain. At this point, his heart is still functioning, but very poorly. His lungs are going to slowly fill with fluid. His circulation will deteriorate. Eventually, his organs will fail. It could take a week, maybe a week and a half. Probably not two."

Kalenna's lips vanished into a thin, uneasy line. Parvok looked from face to face before asking, breathlessly, "And can help come in time?"

Julian wished someone else would answer, but he knew they wouldn't. Neither the Major nor the General could speak to the likely response, neither from Garak nor from Starfleet. Julian sighed.

"It might," he said. "I hope it will. And I hope that when it comes, it will be soon enough for Tain. But one thing is certain." He looked back towards his patient again. "Another attack like that will be fatal. We have to keep him from exerting himself."

Martok growled grimly. "What about the count?"

Julian's insides wrenched, and he found himself quelling a wave of tangible nausea. "He can't stand for the count. An exception will have to be made."

The others stared at him, each with their own measure of disbelief, dread, and defiance. It was Kalenna who found her voice first.

"The Vorta makes no exceptions," she said.

"No," Julian agreed grimly. "But the First might."

 _(fade_ )

It was a long, anxious, and utterly sleepless night for Julian. He brought his inadequate mattress over to the floor by Tain's bed, and bundled himself in his blanket as best he could, but he felt frozen to the core and could not spare the energy to pace. He would have been afraid to move too far from his patient, anyhow. Twice during the hours of lockdown, while the others slept uneasily, Tain lapsed into arrhythmia and had to be brought out of it via the same imprecise, primitive method that had kept him alive so far. During his brief periods of lucidity, he muttered vague threats and imprecations, and complained about Julian's "fussing". By the time the door was unsealed, Julian was almost ready to flee the dome, let alone the barracks, and he climbed stiffly to his feet.

Parvok was already making his bed. When Julian bent to gather his pallet, the Romulan shook his head. "I'll see to that," he said. "Go!"

With a quick word of thanks, Julian left the barracks. His plan, such as it was, necessitated speaking to Ikat'ika before the call to the count, and he didn't know where to look for him at this hour. Prisoners did not seek the Jem'Hadar: they were sought, and never for their benefit. But luck was with him in this respect at least: the First was standing near the mouth of the pod nearest the mess alcove, speaking in low tones to Talak'ran. It took a measure of courage to stride across the empty atrium, bound straight for the deadliest soldier in the camp, but Julian did it. The eyes of the guards at their various posts tracked him as he went. When it was plain to Ikat'ika where Julian was headed, he dismissed the Eighth with a curt flick of the hand.

"The rations are not under my control, human," the First muttered coldly as Julian stepped up before him. "You have angered the Vorta: it is he you must placate."

"I know," Julian said wearily, striving to keep his voice steady and resolute. He had been fighting off the anxiety of that need all night, forcing himself to focus instead on his patient and the proximal confrontation. "That's not what I need to discuss with you."

"And I have no interest in protecting you from the other prisoners," the First said, briskly preemptive. "It is enough that I ensure my Second spares you his attentions."

"I don't need protection from the other prisoners," breathed Julian. That reminder lent him courage. "I have a patient who must be excused from the count."

Ikat'ika's customary glare deepened. "All prisoners must report for the count. There are no exceptions."

"And all Jem'Hadar are to report their injuries to the Vorta, also," said Julian. "Or are there exceptions to that?"

The First looked ready to smite him where he stood. Instead, his eyes narrowed and his scaly lips twitched. "The Vorta sanctioned your treatment of the Eighth," he said stiffly. "He has not objected to your attendance on the others injured in the ring."

"And Arat'zuma's hand?" asked Julian. "Would he object to that? I have no intention of informing him," he added swiftly when Ikat'ika's hand moved to the disruptor on his hip. "I'm only trying to make a point. The Vorta doesn't know everything that happens in this camp. Nor does he need to know."

"All Vorta believe they are aware of everything the Jem'Hadar do or think," the First said, his flat voice lilting dangerously towards contempt. "But he is all too aware of the count. It is his favourite diversion. He likens it to our anticipation of the combat in the ring, but that is a fallacy."

Julian didn't think it was a fallacy: from his perspective, both of these aspects of daily life in Internment Camp 371 were brutish, unnecessary, wasteful, and intended to break the spirits of dispirited and malnourished prisoners. But he had not taken years of empathy and sensitivity training for nothing: he could put himself in Ikat'ika's place long enough to comprehend his point of view on the matter.

"Of course it is," he lied smoothly. "You and your men use the ring to train yourselves, and to learn what you must know in order to face our species in combat. The count, however, has no purpose but cruelty."

Ikat'ika nodded. "The Vorta does not understand that you cannot manufacture fear by such petty means. Either the prisoners fear you, or they do not. No game can change that."

Julian didn't agree with that sentiment, either. He feared the count, and dreaded it every day: for the sake of his own ill-fed body as much as his patients'. But he nodded.

"Then we're in agreement," he said. "The count is unnecessary, so neither is it necessary that it be accurate. If you informed the Vorta that today's number is two hundred one instead of two hundred two, would he know the difference?"

Ikat'ika considered this, brooding blackly. "Not now," he said. "But when your patient is on his feet once more, and able to attend the count? How am I to explain his resurrection?"

Julian felt his eyes widen slightly, and arrested the reflex before it became too flagrant. He didn't doubt Ikat'ika had seen it, but an impression of mild surprise was better than one of unguarded shock. Of course the easiest way to excuse a prisoner from the count was to tell Deyos he was dead. But that hadn't occurred to him, somehow, when mapping out this conversation in his mind.

"You won't have to," said Julian, absolutely truthful. One way or another, Tain would never stand for the count again. Either Ikat'ika would refuse, and tomorrow the Cardassian would fall; or he would accept, and Tain would be spirited away when help came. Or… "He's dying. He'll be dead in a few days, whatever we do. Then you can vaporize the body, and the Vorta need never know."

Ikat'ika's eyes narrowed suspiciously again. "Which prisoner is this? None of the recent combatants have been injured lethally. Or they have, and I failed to observe it?"

"He's not a combatant," said Julian. "It's Enabran Tain, the Cardassian in Barracks 6. The old man. His heart is weak, his lungs are filling with fluid. He's dying of age and the want of proper medical care."

He couldn't help the bitterness that rose in his voice at these last words. The senselessness of this galled him. A medkit. Even just with his medkit, Julian could have guaranteed months of life, and at a far higher quality than the poorly-palliated wretchedness Tain was now enduring.

Ikat'ika's expression had shifted from suspicion to boredom. "If he will be dead in a few days, why do you care if he is excused from the count? Is it not preferable to seek his death now, rather than force him to endure a lingering death from… _infirmity_?" His lip curled with revulsion at that word.

Julian's indignation blazed. _Was it not better to bring Arat'zuma to the Vorta, so he could be executed rather than healed?_ But he managed to rein in his tongue before he made that unretractable error.

"He is not ready to die," he said instead. "He needs time to make peace with himself. To say goodbye. To prepare his spirit for death. That is his Order of Things."

 _And I mean to keep him alive until we can escape. That's mine_ , he thought fiercely. This, too, he was wise enough to keep to himself.

Ikat'ika glared at him. "This Cardassian is known to us. He is feared by the others, but he is circumspect. I believe he has killed some of his own kind during his time in the camp, but he has never made trouble for the guards. He is in many ways a model prisoner."

"Would it be so terrible to reward him for that, and to let him die in peace?" Julian asked. "If you feel you are under any obligation to me, for services past or future, this would discharge that debt."

He had erred. Ikat'ika's eyes blazed with the killing fury Julian remembered all too well from Goran'agar's White-starved men in the jungle of Bopak III. It took all his courage and every ounce of Starfleet self-discipline not to draw back in fear. He stood fast.

Slowly, the barest of stony smiles spread over Ikat'ika's lips. "You fear, but you do not quail, Doctor," he said. Julian wondered if he noticed that he'd chosen the honorific, rather than _human_ or _prisoner_. "Your flesh is soft, your body fragile for all its uncommon speed, and yet your will is as strong as any I have seen. If I refuse your request, what then?"

"I'll go to the Vorta if I have to," said Julian resolutely. He knew that would be a death sentence for Tain, one way or another, but it was the answer most likely to win over the First. He remembered what Captain Sisko had said in the staff debriefing after the mission to destroy the Iconian Gateway. "But I've learned you can't trust the word of a Vorta. The Jem'Hadar have always kept their promises to me. And you and I understand one another, First, in a way I will never understand Deyos."

Ikat'ika considered, head canted sharply to the left as he studied Julian's face in minute, crawling detail. "You may find that is a misguided assumption," he said at last. "But it is true that the Jem'Hadar discharge their obligations when the Order of Things permits it. I am in charge of maintaining an accurate count of the prisoners. In return for your prior and ongoing labours, I would be satisfied to… anticipate that accuracy by a few days. But only a few."

Julian nodded. "That's all I ask. Ten days."

"Ten?" Ikat'ika's voice rose sharply, and one of the nearest sentries looked at them with alert speculation. The First dropped his voice again. "Very well. Two days, or ten: it makes little difference. If on the tenth day the Cardassian yet lives, I will need to remedy the discrepancy."

He meant that he would execute Tain on the tenth day regardless, and Julian wished he had asked for two weeks instead. Could help come that quickly? Surely it would. It would have to. And if it didn't…

He hadn't lied to the others. If nothing precipitated more rapid deterioration of his condition, Tain would be lucky to live a week. Ten days was stretching the prognosis almost beyond the realm of reasonable probability.

"I can't consent to that," said Julian. "I'm his doctor. It's my duty to sustain his life, not to conspire to end it. But I have no power here, and we both know it. Whatever you allow me, I have to accept. Or I get nothing."

Ikat'ika did not quite smirk, but on a Jem'Hadar's impassive face, the expression he wore was near enough. "That is true, human," he said. "The Vorta claims you have not yet learned your place. I believe he is in error."

 _You're damned right he is_ , thought Julian defiantly. _If he thinks it's my place to subjugate myself to his whims, or to the so-called glory of the Dominion, he's not just in error: he's clinically delusional._ Then another part of his mind, equally sarcastic but heavily coloured by a memory of an Irish brogue, remarked, _You know, Julian, this conversation would be a lot more fun if you could say some of this stuff out loud!_

More fun, maybe, but not half as productive. "Then you'll do it?" Julian asked. "The other difficulty is that he can't leave his bed. Our barracks will fail inspection if—"

Ikat'ika waved this off with a blunt, dismissive waft of one craggy hand. "I will inform the Third that Barracks 6 is to pass inspection, today and every day until the Cardassian is dead. The men will obey their First. It is the Order of Things."

Julian was about to thank him when the klaxon blasted: four sharp pulses that jarred the teeth and stung the eardrums.

"Take your place!" Ikat'ika commanded sternly. "Only the Cardassian is excused: you are not."

Julian nodded, turned, and took off at as quick a trot as he dared, with his head swimming with hunger. He didn't make for his usual place, but for the mouth of his barracks pod, where Kalenna was peering anxiously out while other prisoners brushed past her to muster.

"Did you succeed?" she whispered, almost before Julian halted in front of her. "He's breathing, but we can't wake him. Martok tried, and Tain… attempted to bite his hand. He is not strong enough to rise. He—"

"He won't need to," Julian assured her. "I've struck a bargain with the First. Can you fetch the others? I…"

He gestured vaguely, but she understood anyhow. He didn't have the energy to be the errand-runner. Not today. With a nod and the briefest of sympathetic smiles, Kalenna went.

 _(fade_ )

Julian chose his moment. There was no point in forcing the whole camp to endure a lengthy count full of "forgetfulness" and smug remarks. He watched as Deyos emerged from the administration pod, and waited as he approached the far end of the opposite row. He let him count to ten. Then as soon as the Vorta began to drawl out a mocking criticism of the weary man before him — a man who, like everyone else, had endured the last thirty hours on a half-ration of slop and too little water to sustain life for long — Julian stepped out of the line.

"Deyos!" he called.

The Vorta whirled around. The Jem'Hadar escort raised their weapons. Or three of them did. Ikat'ika turned slowly, raising a staying hand so that the other men dropped their rifles from high ready.

A horrible smile spread across the Vorta's face as he abandoned the line he had been counting and strode towards the dissenter. "Doctor," he hissed. "I didn't expect to see you standing _quite_ so straight and tall today! Have your friends failed in their charge to make you pay for your arrogance?"

"It's not their responsibility to make me pay," said Julian, as haughtily as his years of holosuite reenactment had taught him. He thought of standing on the parapets of medieval Dublin, watching for the Vikings on the hazy horizon. He thought of prowling the tarmac at RAF Uxbridge, rallying the spirits of his holographic squadron. He thought of striding through Doctor Noah's study, the lives of his friends in his hands. If not for that last memory, it might have been a frivolous thing to draw strength from now. Or was it? He came from a society where freedom of thought was not just a pretty piece of political rhetoric, but extended to every facet of life. Freedom of imagination, too, was something the Dominion denied its citizens. Julian held his head high and proclaimed boldly, "It's yours."

Deyos's smile faltered, and Julian caught a glimpse of the indignant rage he was trying to mask. He had expected his strategy of yesterday to succeed unhindered. Yet before him stood the man he'd left to the slaughter, unscathed, and the rebel whose spirit he'd hoped to break, undaunted. He was livid.

"Oh, Doctor," he sneered. "I don't think you want that."

"Restore the rations to the others, Deyos," Julian demanded. "You'll kill them if you don't. On a litre of water a day, you can expect to have fatalities on your hands within five days. No one will be fit to stand up in the ring, and then how will you occupy the Jem'Hadar? This is senseless. They—" He gestured broadly at the rows of gaunt, startled faces, glad his back was to his friends. He didn't want to see the horror on Parvok's face, or the silent plea in Kalenna's eyes, or Martok's slowly mounting determination to die at his side if he must. Even a glimpse of the familiar rainbow of lights twinkling across the brow of the Breen's helmet probably would have been enough to break Julian's resolve. "—have done nothing to deserve this. I'm the one who spoke out in front of your superior. I'm the one who's guilty. If you want to punish someone, punish _me_ , not them!"

He had made a terrible error. He knew it almost before the damning word fell from his lips. He saw it in Deyos's eyes the instant it did. But he hadn't let it stop him, or sap his momentum. It was like making an error on an oral exam, like missing a word in a salutatorian speech: Julian had felt compelled to press on, because there was no way to take it back.

The error, of course, had been that one simple phrase: _your superior_. He had made it clear how completely Tiellyn dominated Deyos, and that was the one thing this Vorta could not endure. Julian held his breath, thrust his chin a little farther forward, and waited for the command for the Jem'Hadar to fire.

 _Well, I did my best_ , he thought fleetingly. _I'll die a Starfleet officer, and at least when rescue comes the others can take that back with them to the station_.

But the order did not come. Deyos stepped forward, swift as a viper. He seized the throat of Julian's filthy uniform and dragged his head so close that their brows almost touched. "Pitiful human," he spat, a hissing whisper that misted Julian's jaw with slavering saliva. "I don't need to choose whether to punish them, or to punish you. I can do both!"

Then he flung his arm aside, dragging until Julian's centre of balance shifted just enough for him to stumble. Deyos stepped aside, and the two low-ranking Jem'Hadar seized him by the arms.

"First!" Deyos snapped, already striding back towards the administration pod. "Complete the count. You two: bring the human." Then with a cold, imperious glance to either side he announced for the benefit of the gawking, dumbstruck inmates; "Let's see if a stint in isolation cures that stiff neck!"

 _(fade_ )

They dragged him at what almost amounted to double-time, Julian's feet scrabbling on the floor in an attempt to keep pace. Deyos did not turn into the corridor that led to the force-field and his office beyond, but straight past it and around the pod to the towering cargo bay doors. Through them the little procession passed, and at once Julian felt the temperature drop a perilous three degrees, give or take. In orbital night, the barracks were cold and the atrium colder still. It seemed that this section of the prison was kept only just warm enough that the water in the cisterns in Arat'zuma's kitchen could not freeze.

They didn't turn into that door, but the one across from it: the last before the airlock that led out into the airless void. Although Deyos had made no secret of where they were headed, Julian felt an irrational relief that they were not simply going to fling him out into the vacuum. But then he was being led into another passageway, about twice as broad as the hallways between the barracks. On either side were what looked like converted ore silos, segmented for ease of measurement. Doors had been installed at irregular intervals within them, with a far lower clearance than the ones in the rest of the prison. They had to be lower: the silos themselves, though easily fifty metres long, were only two metres high.

"Here!" said Deyos abruptly, stopping before a door that was less than a handspan from its nearest neighbour. He keyed in a code on a control panel set into the frame, and the door hissed open. Inside, illuminated only by the spill of light from without, was a tiny cell, utterly bare. Julian stared at it, unable to quite make sense of what was happening. He tried frantically to remember what the other prisoners had said about isolation, but it was little enough. Martok had been locked up in this area of the prison for two days when Julian first arrived. Gul Nador's subordinate had been released thirsty and ravenous after a stint of three. Complaining about the food was one sure way to earn a ticket to isolation — Tain had said that, hadn't he, on Julian's first day in the camp?

Deyos jerked his head, and the bruising grips on Julian's humeri eased at once. He tried to straighten himself, still panting from the exertion of the rapid trot and the adrenaline response that was already fading to leave him unsteady and nauseous. The Vorta glared at him, patrician and pitiless.

"Remove your garments," Deyos commanded.

Julian blinked at him. _What_?

Deyos's lip curled. "Remove your garments," he repeated, more slowly and with great relish; "or the Jem'Hadar will do it for you."

The guard on Julian's right reached around to draw something from a sheath in the small of his back. It was a short blade, wickedly curved and gleaming. It bore a resemblance to an _ushaan-tor_ , the ceremonial weapon that was at the core of Andorian martial tradition. His friend and one-time Medical Academy roommate, Erit, had kept one in a velvet-lined box on the shelf above his bed. But there was a vicious utility to this blade that the _ushaan-tor_ lacked, and it was clearly not ceremonial in purpose. Julian understood: he was to remove his garments, or the Jem'Hadar would cut them off.

Then he remembered something else, something he had almost forgotten amid everything else that had transpired that night. When General Martok was released from solitary confinement, crazed and violent in the throes of what Julian still believed was a Klingon manifestation of blind, intolerable panic, he had been barefoot, wearing only his grimy loin cloth. When the situation was diffused, and Martok's madness passed, Varat'elar had dumped all the rest of his clothes, his boots, and his armour disdainfully at Julian's feet. The Klingon warrior had been stripped before he was put in isolation, his belongings returned to him upon release.

"Last warning, Doctor," Deyos said in a smug, singsong voice that would have awakened Julian's indignation and defiance if he had not been so stunned. He could not quite believe this was happening here, now, in the twenty-fourth century. And he was alone.

 _But Martok got his clothes back_ , he told himself. _If you do as you're told, you'll get them back. If the guard uses that knife…_

Even so, his hands were trembling as he opened the front of his jumpsuit and reached down to free his boots. He stepped out of them, and the chill of the floor burned through socks now threadbare and full of holes after weeks of uninterrupted wear. The sour smell of his unwashed feet reached his nostrils regardless, and Julian felt an irrational wrench of shame. He knew he had been denied the means to keep clean, and that his condition was not his fault. But he could not help but wonder if he might have done more, somehow, to behave like a civilized person instead of stewing in his own dead skin and perspiration.

He was cold even with his uniform on; he'd been shivering for days as the asteroid meandered its slow way across the night surface of the gas giant below. Actually slipping his arms out of the jumpsuit was painful. Peeling off his grey undershirt with its one ravaged sleeve was worse. He stood then in socks, trunks, and singlet, hoping against hope that the Vorta would be satisfied. When no one said a word, Julian stooped and retrieved his jumpsuit. He folded it carefully, as he had a lifetime ago, standing in his quarters as he packed his back for the burn treatment conference that had somehow led to _this_.

"You're stalling," Deyos taunted. His eyes raked over the stains and discolourations on Julian's undergarments. "I imagine you smell absolutely foul. What foresight the Founders had, to engineer away the Vorta's sense of smell."

Julian's cheeks flamed as he hooked a thumb in the tattered cuff of one sock Despite his humiliation and the awful consciousness of his filthy state, it felt good to peel the greasy, fetid rag off. He removed the other, and then rolled them together before tucking them both into his left boot. Repellent as they were, he could not afford to lose them. Already, his toes were aching with the chill.

Then came the singlet, raking against the rash under each arm. Julian felt it drag over his hair, and wished he'd been more careful. Sitting right next to his skin, it was almost more disgusting than the socks. He folded it, too, more quickly, and laid it on top of his jumpsuit. His arms began to creep across his ribs in an instinctively defensive gesture he knew all too well. It was an old self-soothing mechanism, a posture born as much of shame as of misery. He forced his hands to his sides, balled tightly into fists. He refused to let them see he was ashamed.

Deyos saw it anyway, and he laughed. The sound made the exposed hair on Julian's arms, already prickling as his skin tingled and stiffened into the tiny bumps of the pilomotor reflex, stand right on end.

"Oh, don't worry, Doctor: we'll let you keep your dignity," he said, sneering at the trunks that were now all Julian had left to him. "Now get inside. And consider your defiance carefully. There is no place in the Dominion for malcontents."

Julian looked at the low door. The lintel was level with his collarbones. He would have to stoop to get inside, and the room beyond didn't look much more than a metre deep. The door was solid, and he could see no light fixture within. Once it was closed, would he be in utter darkness?

"How long?" he croaked, hating the tremor in his voice but unable to quell it. He'd seen what this place had done to Martok after only two days. While Klingons had a lower tolerance for incarceration than humans, it was one hell of an image to carry with him right now.

Deyos's grin looked like the snarl of a Klingon sabre bear. "Until I'm satisfied, of course!" he said, bristling with perverse delight. Then he nodded sharply.

Julian didn't have time to gather his wits. He was punted between the shoulder-blades with the butt of a plasma rifle, and he stumbled forward. One bare foot slipped on the seamless stone composite, and he crashed over the lip of the door, bashing his shin against it as his knees hit the floor of the ore silo. He thrust out his palms to catch himself, and felt one scraped raw against the gridded metal. His ankles and feet were still in the corridor, bare toes bent back against the smoother floor without. Then a boot blasted into the arch of one foot, and Julian could not stop the reflex that sent him scurrying away from the assault. He dragged his feet over the lip and into the box, the crown of his head smacking the back wall of the "cell" as he went. He bit down hard on the cry but could do nothing for the momentary explosion of pain and blinding artifact that tore through his head — already fragile with the aftereffects of his prior concussions. Dazed and disoriented, he did as instinct demanded and curled himself into a ball of long, chilled limbs and bone-numbing dread.

"Enjoy your stay, Doctor," Deyos taunted, and there was a blip of electronic circuitry.

The door slid shut, and Julian was left alone in the inky, eyeless dark.

_(fade to black)_


	71. Teaser: Ethical Issues of Command

_Note: "Moral and Ethical Issues of Command" is a core course at Starfleet Academy, taught in the 2350s and 2360s by Professor Somak. From 5.02, "The Ship"._

_Worf remembers dialogue from TNG 7.05, "Gambit, Part 2". It is a magnificent scene, starting about timestamp 12:30. Go watch it. I love Data._

_Guess who's birthday is tomorrow! Remember: there is no better present for an author than your feedback!_

**Part XIII, Teaser: Ethical Issues of Command**

The inertial dampers were still imperfectly aligned: when the docking clamps engaged, a reactionary shudder rippled through the deck plates of the _U.S.S. Defiant_. Still, Lieutenant Commander Worf was grimly satisfied by the crippled vessel's performance on this mission. Without the benefit of appropriate automated controls, the crew had nonetheless managed everything asked of them. From Chief O'Brien's masterful management of the Engine Room to Cadet Nog's meticulous relaying of all essential communications, everyone had risen to the challenge with professionalism and tremendous skill. Perhaps most impressive of all — not that Worf was inclined to be impartial with his private opinion in this case — had been Jadzia's piloting. It was no easy feat to manoeuvre a starship, especially not one as minutely responsive as the _Defiant_ without any of the supports, calculations, and adjustments the computer was supposed to be able to offer. Yet _she_ , magnificent as she was, had done so with a competence to rival Commander Data's, and an unequalled aplomb.

She sank back in her seat, curling into the contours of the helm chair with an almost inaudible sigh as she lifted her fingers from the controls and splayed them in a slow stretch. It was the first sign of strain she had shown on the mission, and Worf's pride was mollified to realize that she, at least, was as exhausted as the rest of them.

He was not certain the same could be said for Sisko. The Captain had been dominating the whole bridge with his presence since returning from his meal break, and he was still occupying the command chair as if it were the Chancellor's throne in the chamber of the High Council itself. He was at this moment a man in absolute control of his domain, and the blaze of power and certainty still smouldering in his eyes should have filled Worf's warrior's heart with pride and the elation of a victorious mission. Ordinarily, it would have; but not this day.

The Captain sucked in a deep breath that flared his nostrils and filled his capacious lungs. Gripping the arms of his chair, he launched himself to his feet. "Commander Worf, you have the bridge. Once the post-flight checklist is complete, and repairs are resumed, you can turn over command to Engineering, and get some rest. You've earned it. We all have."

"Yes, sir," Worf said, rising rigidly from the tactical station and moving to assume the place Sisko had just vacated. He did not sit; merely took a broad stance upon the plinth beneath the chair, and watched as his captain clapped Jadzia on the shoulder.

"Old Man, you're with me," he said, wheeling on one booted heel and striding for the door without further instruction. As it hissed open before him, he laid a hand on the post and turned back, a slow, broad grin spreading across his face. "Well done, everyone," Sisko proclaimed warmly. "That was an unconventional mission, to say the least, and all of you rose to the challenge. I doubt there's a crew in the fleet that knows their ship better than this one does. I'm proud of you all."

Worf had been tracking his captain out of the corner of his eye. Now he could not restrain himself: he turned his shoulders as well, waiting expectantly for the explanation, the justification, the apology. It did not come. Sisko tipped one last quick smile at Cadet Nog, who nodded curtly to disguise the fact that his chest — and his sense of self — had inflated another several centimetres, and then left the bridge. Jadzia strode after him, looking back to cast Worf a merry wink as she stepped over the lip of the exit. The door slid closed behind her.

Worf looked around at the expectant faces now turned to him, awaiting his orders. Ordinarily he took tremendous pride in assuming command of this ship — _his ship_ in a way the _Enterprise_ never had been, not merely a home but a vessel he took great pride in operating under his own authority on frequent occasions. But now, he was in turmoil. The answers had not come with Captain Sisko's parting words, and so it seemed Worf had to seek them out himself. He could not do that standing here, talking the crew through routine procedures that, necessary though they were, were almost beneath their skill level after the prowess they had exhibited in the last couple of days.

"Major," he said, turning to where Kira sat at the Communications console. "Will you assume command and oversee the post-flight checklist as the Captain has instructed?"

She blinked at him. It was an uncharacteristic request. On Deep Space Nine, she was the Executive Officer, her authority unchallenged. On the _Defiant_ , Worf took on that role when he was present, and she was relegated to Second Officer. He disliked relinquishing control of this vessel to anyone, and she knew it.

"Me?" she said.

Worf considered withdrawing the request. But the need was too great. He nodded once, curtly. "Yes. If you are unwilling—"

"No," she said. "No, I'll take care of it." She rose and joined him before the chair, stepping up as he stepped down and leaning circumspectly in to whisper as they passed each other; "He did what he had to do, Commander. It was the right call."

"I have not said otherwise," Worf muttered. The junior officers at the auxiliary stations had certainly not heard the exchange, but he was equally confident that Cadet Nog _had_. The momentarily startled expression that morphed into sudden urgent fascination with the ceiling panels as Worf turned towards the young Ferengi affirmed that. Worf did not challenge him for eavesdropping, although he would have been well within his right to do so. He merely strode past as if he could not see the boy, and disembarked the bridge. As the door closed, he could already hear Kira delivering her orders in a brisk, authoritative staccato. The ship was in good hands.

If the Captain and Jadzia had gone first to the brig to oversee the prisoner's release for transfer, they had moved very quickly. By the time Worf reached the airlock where the Defiant's umbilicus met the Docking Ring, the two of them were already aboard the station. Worf hung back in the bulkhead junction, allowing the two Security officers to escort their charge out into the adjoining airlock; the one with the circular doors. He could hear the wry gravel of Odo's voice as they went, welcoming Captain Sisko.

Eddington paused for a fraction of a second, causing Ensign Kasali to move a wary hand nearer his phaser. The traitor's eyes met Worf's, sarcastically insolent, and his lip curled ever so slightly before he took the last step from the Starfleet deck plating to the Cardassian, and left behind the vessel he had disabled so insidiously. All the while, Worf kept his expression as stony and unyielding as a statue. He would have gladly cut the man down in battle, had the mission called for it. The part of Worf that had been the Chief of Security aboard the flagship of the fleet would have relished being the one to walk Eddington in disgrace all the way to his cell. But in this moment the surest way to wound a man who had shown a monstrously inflated ego in every recent interaction was with blank-eyed indifference. Worf noted the slightest slump take the shoulders of the dusty leather jacket as Eddington marched on. He was attempting to swagger, insolent to the last, but he too was exhausted — and he did not have even the satisfaction of triumph to spur him on.

The low rumble of Sisko's voice came next, laced with grim vindication and thinly veiled contempt. "Constable," he prompted. The title was Odo's, but the growl was meant for Eddington.

"This way," Odo said, as brusque and bored as if collecting a disorderly drunk from Quark's, or nudging off a loiterer on the Promenade. It seemed Worf was not the only one who sensed it was a lack of ceremony more than anything else that would dispirit the prisoner.

Worf listened as they moved off, still standing at the junction out of the direct line of sight. He was about to emerge when he heard another voice, the one he loved better than any in his life. There was no honour in eavesdropping like a Ferengi cadet, but he could not restrain himself.

"Benjamin, I'm curious," she said somehow grave and teasing all at once. "Your plan to poison the Maquis planets. You didn't clear it with Starfleet first, did you?"

Without intending to, Worf ceased to breathe. He had assumed… he had _wished_ to assume that of course the Captain would have sought authorization before implementing such a controversial measure. And yet he had known, he supposed, that Sisko had not. There had been something far, far too forceful about the way he had given the order to fire, as if knowing he did not have the authority of Starfleet Command or Admiral Nechayev behind him, he had sought to convey it through the force of his will alone. And it had worked. Worf had followed the order. Had fired the torpedoes. Had scattered trilithium resin into the biosphere of a living world, rendering it uninhabitable to all human life.

"I knew I'd forgotten to do something," Sisko said dryly. It was the tone Jadzia professed to love hearing from her friend, but it filled Worf with a profound unquiet now. This was no time for sarcasm! It was not a matter to take lightly. Only success ameliorated that dubious act. If the plan had failed…

"Big gamble!" Jadzia almost chuckled. What the Captain said next chilled Worf's warrior's blood.

"That's what it takes to be a good villain," he declared, without a hint of irony.

Or perhaps there had been a hint after all? Because as their voices moved up the corridor, fading with distance, Worf heard his parMach'kai say, with her stunning smile apparent in her voice; "You know? Sometimes I _like_ it when the bad guy wins!"

What was she saying? Supporting the Captain's decision was one thing, appropriate in a bridge officer once the call was made and especially understandable now the aim was achieved. But she seemed to be advocating villainy!

Worf commanded himself to slow down. To pause, to consider, to weigh her words. He was not always swift to catch on to Jadzia's unique sense of humour. She delighted in twisting her words and her meanings in such elaborate acrobatics of connotation and logic that he was compelled to wonder if it was a way of channeling the spirit of the host who had been an Olympic gymnast. She moved too rapidly from gravity to levity, and she could always be relied upon to supply an insincere quip at the most serious of moments. His own sense of humour — which he _did_ possess, however she liked to tease him about its shortcomings — was more calculated. Slower, perhaps. Deliberate. And deadpan, which was a device she used so seldom herself that she never failed to catch him off guard with it.

So likely he had misunderstood somehow. Captain Sisko could not be saying he had acted out of a desire to pursue an evil end, and Jadzia was not congratulating him for doing so. But the exchange raised still more questions, and Worf found himself striding after them at a rapid pace. He rounded the corner just as Jadzia was stepping onto the turbolift, and she reached to obstruct the door sensor as she caught sight of him.

"Worf!" she said in pleased surprise, her smile broadening. "Finished already?"

He quickened his pace to close the distance, and stepped into the turbolift with them, turning sharply to face the door as it closed. "I have delegated that responsibility to Major Kira," he reported flatly. "Captain… I have questions about the mission."

"Yes, I thought you might," mused Sisko, his voice near the bottom of its register. The teasing amusement was gone from it, and there was none in his eyes, either, as he watched the lift ascend, then shift to starboard. "I appreciate, Mister Worf, that you did not raise those questions on the bridge, when the order was given."

"Yes, sir," Worf said stiffly. It was easier to fix his eyes straight ahead than to face his captain now, and he disliked that knowledge. In his year and a half at this posting, he had learned a great deal. Much of it he had learned from Sisko. Some, he had learned _about_ Sisko. None of it had prepared him for what he had witnessed in orbit above Solosos III _. "_ That was not the time to question your orders."

"No," Sisko said, almost dreamily. "It wasn't."

Worf had learned a hard lesson once about when it was and was not appropriate for an Executive Officer to object to his captain's plan, or to question his captain's reasoning. It would have been a grave breach of protocol, and quite likely a fatal tactical error, to do so in the midst of a tense negotiation with a hostile party — all the more so while Eddington was on the holo-communicator, observing all that took place on the _Defiant's_ bridge. In that moment, when he had hesitated in disbelief at the order, Worf had heard Lieutenant Commander Data's cool and emotionless and yet somehow vigorously censorious voice: _The primary role of the second in command is to carry out the decisions of the captain… Once I have made a decision, it is your job to carry it out, regardless of how you may personally feel_. _Any further objections should be given to me in private, not in front of the crew._ It was a lecture — and a lesson — Worf would never forget.

Today, that lesson had ensured the success of the mission. But at what cost? Did the fact that the Cardassian colonists displaced by Eddington's initial act of terror, and the Maquis colonists displaced by the Captain's response could and would be readily resettled on one another's planets ameliorate the morally dubious act that had brought about this resolution? Did the expediency of capturing Eddington — unquestionably a threat to the security of the Federation and the delicate balance of peace in the sector — outweigh the broader moral consideration?

One thing Worf was quite sure of: this was not the solution Captain Jean Luc Picard would have implemented. He knew his new captain was a very different man from his previous one. He had believed he'd come to terms with that, and learned to admire and appreciate Captain Sisko for his own merits. Now, he wondered. Worf disliked uncertainty. It unsettled him more deeply than he could express.

He had worked up both the courage and the frustration necessary to speak, it seemed, because with his next breath, the words began to come. "Captain. I do not see how you can justify—"

Jadzia clicked her tongue, and a fraction of a second later, the turbolift slid to a smooth halt. Worf forced himself into silence as the doors slid open to reveal the bright bustle of the Promenade. He angled his shoulders deferentially so that Captain Sisko could be the first to disembark, his science officer strolling in his wake. Jadzia shot Worf the tiniest of narrow-eyed glances behind Sisko's back, but they followed him in silence.

There was no sign of Eddington's passage, though he had to have come through only moments before. The traffic was moving uninterrupted, and it seemed that the citizenry of Deep Space Nine had little interest in the capture of the former Chief of Starfleet Security. Worf sincerely hoped that meant the obnoxious man had been denied any opportunity to make a speech. He had not missed Eddington's incessant pontificating when he had defected, and Worf would not miss it now. He had heard enough of it in the last few days to last through more lifetimes than his parMach'kai could boast.

The only person on the main level of the Promenade who didn't seem to be going briskly about his business was a human male, one of the civilians whose faces routinely filled in the backdrop of station life. He was sitting on one of the curved benches just before the main entrance to the Ferengi's bar, elbow on the seat back and chin in his hand. He was gazing up into the ether with an unmistakably desolate, lovelorn expression that made Worf want to roll his eyes. Matters of the heart were seldom simple and often painful, but that was no excuse to moon about the Promenade.

He followed the man's gaze upward, to the mezzanine level. There, leaning with crossed arms on the railing as he looked calmly and resolutely off towards the observation windows, was a willowy Adorian male. Worf could not recall his name, but he was the astrophysicist from the Daystrom Institute who spend so much of his time on the main sensor array. If he was aware that he was the object of yearning for the human below, he gave no sign. Of that, Worf approved. Not the obliviousness, if that was the cause, but of the circumspection if it was not. One's private life should remain private, after all.

The Captain had summoned the lift on the inner ring of the Promenade: the one that would take them to Ops. Once inside, Worf considered resuming his challenge. But they only had twenty-two seconds before they would once again be in front of junior officers, and these ones would be eager for news of the mission. They would be even more attentive to the smallest signs of discord or discontent among the command crew.

So Worf held his tongue and set his face into its customary hard, sombre lines — what Jadzia loved to call, playfully, his on-duty scowl. He followed the Captain as Sisko strode out into Ops, greeting his people as he went. One thing that could be said for him: he was more personable than Captain Picard had ever been. This made him more approachable in the eyes of many, Worf knew. It was part of what made him so well-suited to a stationary assignment. He did not merely build an effective team, but a coherent and dynamic community.

Jadzia was still following, probably just as curious about Worf's objections as Worf was thirsty for answers. They flanked Sisko half a step behind him, two tall, straight-backed bodyguards. At moments like this it was hard to quell the little voice of vanity that told Worf that he and his beloved were a splendidly matched pair, intellectually, spiritually, _and_ physically. They mounted the stairs to the Captain's office in step, and each stepped aside in formation as soon as they cleared the door.

Worf had expected Sisko to take his seat immediately. Instead, he had halted a couple of paces into the room, head cocked and tilted slightly back in amused surprise. Behind the broad desk, leaning back in the Captain's padded chair, was Doctor Julian Bashir.

He grinned, but did not sit up straight, much less spring out of the seat and up to attention as he should have done — if not out of decorum than out of sheer embarrassment to be caught lounging at his commanding officer's desk. This lack of the proper respect irked Worf. The Doctor had only completed his command certification three months ago, and this was the first occasion he had actually been left in charge of the station while the rest of the command crew was out with the _Defiant_. From the look of things, it had been a mistake to allow him the privilege.

"Welcome back!" Bashir said warmly, smiling up at his _standing_ captain. "Did you get him?"

"We got him," Sisko declared with almost savage satisfaction. Then he raised his brows and asked quizzically; "Comfortable, Doctor?"

"Me?" Bashir said, brightly perplexed. Then he looked down at himself, and sat up so that the chair snapped out of its semi-reclined angle. Worf heard the telltale _thump_ of a boot on the carpet: the man had not even had both feet flat on the floor! "Oh, yes, sir, it's a very good chair."

He meandered to his feet. There simply was no other word for it. The last time Worf had observed a living being move that languorously, it had been a Terran feline stretching under a heat lamp. He was surprised Bashir did not extend his arms in a long, slow stretch as if waking from a deep nap. He swung them instead, rocking on the balls of his feet as he rounded the desk and took a backward step out of the way. Then he bopped one palm against the other hand, loosely fisted, and grinned again.

"She's all yours, Captain," he said, still completely unabashed. "Thanks for the opportunity to try her out."

"Hmm!" Sisko made a musical noise of wry amusement, slipping past his delinquent Chief Medical Officer and settling behind his desk with the _proper_ gravitas. Worf glanced at his parMach'kai to see if she appreciated what an affront the physician's behaviour was to protocol, and saw to his dismay (if not precisely his surprise) that Jadzia's lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes alight with silent laughter.

"How did you enjoy running the show, Julian?" she asked, her voice tightened by ill-concealed mirth.

Worf expected some inane quip from the man. Bashir was a capable physician and a diligent officer, but he often lacked the appropriate gravitas. The man simply did not take life seriously enough. Jadzia laughed in the face of death, her humour tempered by wisdom, experience, and lifetimes' worth of suffering. Doctor Bashir lived as if had never known hardship. He did not seem to understand what it was to suffer. And his demeanour made that painfully clear at almost every opportunity. He could settle into calmest competence when faced with an emergency or a patient in need. The rest of the time, it was like trying to work alongside an overly cheerful young boy instead of a Starfleet Officer. Worf did not dislike the man. But he was exhausting.

He was bobbing his head now, grinning inanely. "Couldn't have gone smoother," he said to Dax before turning to Sisko so sharply that it almost looked like he was cutting her out of the conversation entirely. "We had a bit of a hiccough yesterday when the reactor core coolant levels started fluctuating — you know the way station systems start acting up whenever Chief O'Brien's gone for more than thirteen hours — but we managed to get the situation under control. I've got Rom's team working to find out the cause, but I expect Miles will want to look for himself. He's very good, you know. Rom, I mean. Good under pressure. Him, and the new Bajoran maintenance technician, Poudrel. I'd keep an eye on him: he knows his job and really ought to be recognized for it."

"I'll make a note of that, thank you, Doctor," said Captain Sisko, still looking more than a little amused. "Any other recommendations, station commander to station commander?"

Bashir chuckled and held up his hands. "Now, now, I don't have my eye on your job, Captain!" he said. "Though I can't deny I've enjoyed myself. Welcomed the new Lurian ambassador for you, too; he may want a personal visit eventually, but I think he's mollified for the next few days. Somehow I never imagined he'd have quite that much _hair…_ "

Worf was getting restive. If Bashir intended to offer commentary on every quotidian decision he had made while performing a job that, quite frankly, could and often had been delegated to junior officers who'd done it with at least equal competence and far less _talking_ , they were going to be here all night. He wanted the man to wrap up his little monologue and get back to his infirmary, so that Worf could ask Sisko to explain his actions in the Solosos System.

Just then, however, the comm chirped. "Corporal Vaeda to Captain Sisko. I've got an incoming message from Admiral Nechayev for you."

Sisko nodded sharply. "Thank you, Corporal. Put her through." He looked at each of the three department heads before him in turn. "If you three will excuse me? I'm sure she wants to be briefed on the resettlement plans."

Worf could not help his expression darkening a little with displeasure at this, but Jadzia was already turning, plucking his sleeve to induce him to follow her. They stepped out onto the upper deck of Ops, Bashir shambling behind them. Jadzia steered Worf to the replicator, and thrust her head at it as if to punctuate an unspoken reproof.

"Raktajino, double strong, extra cream," she said. The drink materialized a second later, and she raised it to her lips with a sigh of anticipation. Her eyelids fluttered low as she took a long sip of the steaming beverage. "Ooh, needed that!" she breathed.

"Long trip?" Bashir asked with counterfeit sympathy. Worf could hear the insincerity of the question, even if his parMach'kai could not. She insisted upon ignoring the man's obvious affinity for her, an affinity Worf was still convinced — despite her dismissiveness of the idea — ran along many veins, not all of them wholly limited to friendship. It was undeniable that he would exert any effort to garner her attention, and he had no qualms about monopolizing her time, even when she had clearly laid it aside for other purposes. That was what he was doing right now.

And Jadzia was playing into his hand. She nodded ruefully, rubbing the back of her neck with her free hand even as she manoeuvred the mug back to her lips with the other. "You could say that," she agreed. "I tell you, I'd forgotten what it takes to pilot a ship with a stripped computer. Torias used to do it all the time: the autopilot subroutines were always some of the last modifications made to a prototype, usually after the first couple of cold flights. But none of those little fighters and hoppers and shuttles were anywhere _near_ as complex as the _Defiant_."

"I'm sure you did admirably," Bashir said. How could she not see how he pandered to her? There was no sincerity to his praise. None at _all_ , in fact, and Worf realized that was unusual. The doctor was known to let his interest wander now and then when the conversation wasn't following the course he wanted, but he wasn't the sort of person to offer hollow flattery. His praise might often be too effusive, but it was always earnest.

Almost always, apparently?

Jadzia didn't notice. Her eyes were travelling to the life support station, where one of her subordinates seemed to be trying to catch her eye. "Excuse me, gentlemen," she said, and went off to speak to the lieutenant.

Bashir did not watch her go. That, too, was unusual. Worf could not prove the man still desired his parMach'kai, but he certainly did tend to track her with his eyes when she took her leave of him. It was a sign of affection many humans exhibited: towards friends, towards family, towards anyone they held in high regard. Yet now, even though it was the first time the two of them had spoken in several days, and even though according to Jadzia they had not spent their customary amount of time in one another's company in weeks, Bashir had no interest in where she was going or what she was doing. As soon as she moved off, he looked at Worf instead.

"Captain Sisko poisoned a planet?" he breathed, his voice judiciously low. "What do you make of that?"

He would have received the mission update Major Kira had transmitted back to the station as soon as Eddington surrendered, of course. Worf was not surprised he was aware, nor that he wanted to talk about it. Worf himself wanted very much to discuss it — but not with Julian Bashir. Still, he could not simply walk away as Jadzia had done. He lacked a convenient excuse, for one thing. And he had seen how Bashir followed people around like a young targ when he wanted something. It was better to indulge him, briefly and curtly, and hope he would move on to more fertile waters as quickly as possible.

"There is nothing to be _made_ of it," he said flatly. "It is done. The Cardassians will be relocated to Solosos III, and the Maquis colonists will take their world instead."

"And that's how you justify it?" Bashir asked. "We went after Eddington in the first place because he used a biological weapon, and now Captain Sisko has done the same."

Worf opened his mouth, about to demand what made this man think he was the supreme arbiter of morality for the United Federation of Planets. And then he saw the Doctor's expression. Bashir did not look judgemental or belligerent, but genuinely doubtful. It seemed that he, too, was grappling with what had been done. He did not even have the benefit of bearing witness to the events in question, and Worf felt an unexpected stirring of empathy for the man's position.

He cast a careful, appraising glance around Ops, but no one was listening. The sight of two senior officers conferring at the replicator was not an uncommon one, and it was hardly worthy of note. Had Nog been present, he likely would have been able to hear them without effort — as he had done Worf's exchange with Major Kira — but to less sensitive ears, their voices would be no more than a muddled murmur.

"I, too, had my concerns," Worf said gravely. "The Captain is fortunate that the outcome was favourable."

The cold satisfaction in Bashir's sudden smile was both unexpected and gratifying. It seemed he, too, had taken Eddington's betrayal as a fundamental affront. Worf could not always tell whether the physician took such matters as seriously as the rest of them did: his customary demeanour was one of carefree frivolity, and it had never sat well with Worf's own grave outlook.

"Will he be held here until his court martial?" Bashir asked.

"I do not know," said Worf, again surprised and impressed by the substance of the question. He had not yet thought to ask it himself, and with his service record, he should have. "It is possible Captain Sisko will want him held here, but the usual protocol would entail a transfer to a location with more ample holding facilities."

It was unusual for Deep Space Nine's Security Office to house prisoners for more than a few days. Usually they were either released on their own recognizance until their hearings, if any were warranted, or passed on to Bajor or Starbase 370, depending on their citizenship and the nature of the offence of which they were accused. In Worf's time on the station, the only exception had been the Cardassian spy. Garak had served his sentence for sabotage and assault under Odo's custody. Although his crimes had been committed aboard the _Defiant_ , Sisko had seen fit to charge him under Bajoran jurisdiction; it had seemed unwise to send a Cardassian to a Bajoran detention centre.

The more serious charges of attempted genocide and incitement to war had never been brought. It was another decision Captain Sisko had made that trod a moral grey area that left Worf disquieted and questioning. He understood there was a degree of cultural sensitivity at play: to Garak's mind, and in the view of Cardassian society, a preemptive strike was justified if the threat was significant enough. But it had been Worf who had caught the man in the act, rearranging the isolinear chips in the quantum torpedo launch control system. It had been Worf who saw the bald malice and chilling resolve in Garak's eyes as he had spat, _I'm not talking about war! What I'm proposing is wiping out every Founder on that planet; obliterating the Great Link!_ And had it been up to Worf, he would have suffered far graver consequences than a few months in a holding cell.

"Tell me," Bashir said, his eyes suddenly very different. They were intently focused now, and somehow troubled, as if the debate was not about the Captain's actions, but his own. "Would you have felt differently those trilithium torpedoes had endangered Klingon lives?"

"What?" Worf was taken aback by the question. It was unlike Bashir to reduce any matter to a question of species. Indeed, of the countless human officers with whom Worf had served over the years, the Doctor possessed one of the most cosmopolitan outlooks. His appreciation of other species and cultures was simultaneously deep and expansive. To attempt to reduce this question of moral action to whether the displaced colonists were human or Klingon was either uncharacteristic, or he was failing to convey his true intent.

"Would it weigh more heavily on your mind if you'd detonated a weapon like that against your own kind?" Bashir rephrased with almost breathless intensity. "Or do the ends justify the means, even at such a cost?"

Worf shook his head tightly. "I am not suggesting the ends always justify the means," he said. "But the Maquis colonists were not in any true danger. They had ample vessels available for a timely evacuation, and if they had not, the Defiant was prepared to step in to render aid. The means in this case were… less than ideal. But it was not a matter of using deadly force."

 _Big gamble_ , Jadzia had said. Worf saw that was true. Sisko had weighed all of this, the risks and the variables and the potential for catastrophe, and he had somehow determined it was worth the chance. He had trusted that his crew, and their limping, half-functional vessel, could carry out the necessary actions _and_ do what was necessary to prevent loss of life in the event one of the countless variables beyond their control failed. Worf was not certain that in the Captain's place, he would have possessed such certainty. He was not certain he would have been able to take the necessary action.

That was almost more troubling than Sisko's ruthless resolve had been when he gave the order to fire.

"And if it had been?" asked Bashir, disquieted. "If a Klingon life, or a Federation life, had been at stake?"

"Eddington posed an existential threat," he said firmly, certain of that much, at least. "Not only to the Cardassian colonies in the Demilitarized Zone, but to the peace between our two powers, and to the Federation itself. The attack upon the Malinche proved that. The risk was necessary. He had to be stopped, and he has been."

A faint smile tugged at Bashir's lips. "And order is restored," he said, almost singsong.

"Yes," Worf said curtly. Jadzia liked to tease him about his need for a structured and orderly life, and sometimes Chief O'Brien did the same. That did not mean he wanted to encourage such ribbing from Bashir. "Or at least, the balance of power. The Maquis have surrendered their biogenic weapons, and they have been deprived of their most dangerous leader. I expect they will prove significantly subdued."

The smile was not so faint now. Doctor Bashir nodded. "I don't doubt that," he said, almost smugly. Then he clapped Worf on the shoulder. "Thanks, Mister Worf. I feel much better."

With that, he strolled off, tossing a casual word of greeting to Ensign Garrett as he went. Worf watched him as he shambled onto the turbolift, calling for the Promenade, and vanished slowly below floor level as it descended. There was something so strange about the conversation they'd just had, but Worf could not quite discern what it had been. He supposed he was still unsettled by events, but he was also reassured. In speaking to explain the Captain's actions, he had found a way to understand them as he had not on the bridge of the _Defiant_. The burning need for an explanation, for justification, perhaps for contrition, was gone.

He heard the hiss of the double doors leading to the elevated office. The Cardassian architecture, authoritarian and commanding, was so unlike Captain Picard's discreet and welcoming ready room tucked away off a corner of the bridge on the _Enterprise_. Sisko had made every attempt to make the space itself inviting and his position within it approachable, but he was limited by the base design. Worf registered the sound, but did not immediately connect it to his earlier request until Sisko's voice drifted across the sunken centre area of Ops.

"Commander Worf? Would you join me, please?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," Worf said neatly, and strode to join him. As the door closed behind them, Sisko turned to him with earnest, open eyes.

"Thank you for your patience," he said, moving around the desk to sit. He did so heavily, with the softest of sighs, and pinched the bridge of his nose as he gestured that Worf should take the chair before him. Now, his exhaustion was plain, as was the toll this mission had taken upon him. He blinked ponderously before fixing his gaze on his Strategic Operations Officer again. "I believe you had questions about my decision… and my methods?"

"I did, sir," Worf allowed. "But I have given the matter more thought, and I believe I understand. You were dealing with an irrational adversary. It was necessary to act in a way he could not have predicted. And the mission _was_ a success."

"Yes," the Captain said thoughtfully, his eyes misting briefly as if with a troubling memory. He sighed again, more heavily this time. "It's not easy to sit in the big chair, Mister Worf," he muttered at last.

Worf nodded. "So I am beginning to appreciate, sir."

Slowly and wearily, Captain Sisko smiled.

 _(fade to theme_ )


	72. What One Eye Sees

_Note: My health problems persist. Correspondence and review replies are coming, as I'm able to handle them. I'm so grateful for the feedback and support, and I thank everyone for their patience! It seems to be the general consensus that at times like this, it's better to have a new chapter than to have prompt replies to your wonderful feedback, so I'm carrying on with that tradition._

_The next chapter of "Cruel are the Times" is overdue, another casualty of my illness. It is still very much in the works, and has been delayed only by a necessary exercise that I think will prove enjoyable to all when the time is right. Okay, not enjoyable to Julian. But to the rest of us._

**Part XIII, Act I: What One Eye Sees**

The first ninety-five seconds of Julian Bashir's sentence of solitary confinement were served in a haze of throbbing agony as his frontal and parietal lobes protested the impact against the cell wall. It was a brief but tortured span of time, when he curled defensive forearms — too late — around his pulsating skull, and pressed the lower third of his face into the valley where two bare, bony knees met. His spine was rounded against the pain and the panic and the lingering phantom of the impact of the rifle butt against the medial aspect of his inferior trapezii; his legs were huddled under him. The slender strip of his rational mind not overcome by the rapid firing of rattled neurons knew that the Jem'Hadar were gone, that they were gone and he was alone and likely to remain that way for far, far longer than he would want. But his instincts were all bent on bracing for the next blow.

Then his breathing levelled out, and the worst of the white-hot cranial pain receded, and the phosphene ballet behind his eyelids slowed and thinned and faded altogether. Then, Julian could feel his other discomforts. His right shin was throbbing where it had struck the lip of the door, his knees and right palm were stinging rawly from the fall against the shallowly textured floor. And he was cold. Horrifyingly, helplessly cold. Freezing. Every muscle in his body was tensed against the impulse to shiver, his bare skin burning in the bitter air. When he tried to unclench his jaw form its reflexive rictus of pain, his teeth began to chatter violently.

Slowly, Julian forced one arm to uncurl, baring a broad swath of untidy hair and suddenly chilled scalp. He planted his palm and pushed himself up as if he were an invalid, or a dystrophy patient struggling to maintain some degree of muscle tone through arduous physical therapy. The effort was far more exhausting than Julian's physical condition warranted, deteriorating though it was. He couldn't blame the creeping malnutrition, or the fact that he'd eaten only a few mouthfuls of stewed grain in the last two days. This was the epinephrine crash: he'd been carried on a tide of adrenaline since the moment he'd strode out to seek Ikat'ika. Now it was spent, and it had left him shaky and weak.

He eased back onto his heels, feeling them dig into his backside with only one thin, greasy layer of cloth between. With his other hand, the one with the scraped palm, he tugged at the deteriorating hem of the foul-smelling trunks. Julian didn't know whether to be relieved he had been permitted to retain one small rag of modesty, or to be sorry he hadn't been relieved of the filthy garment. It wasn't going to be much use in keeping him warm.

Now that his eyes were open, Julian could appreciate the perfect blackness of his surroundings. He could see nothing before him, nothing above. Slowly he shuffled on his knees so that he turned a precise one hundred eighty degrees to where the door ought to be. Just to be certain, he reached out into the emptiness. His elbow had not straightened when his fingers grazed the wall. He felt along it and found the seam that sealed him in. He was facing the door, all right, but not so much as a pinprick of light escaped around it. He might as well have been encased in a tomb.

That thought brought on a shudder of visceral dread that broke his body's fragile equilibrium. Suddenly, Julian was shivering violently, limbs quaking while the muscles of his back and chest twitched and tightened. Hurriedly he got his legs out from under him, hugging his knees to his chest. That was better, if only a little. He didn't have much body heat to spare, not after days in the misery of orbital night, and without his uniform he was pressing cold flesh to cold flesh. But at least this way it was now only the soles of his bare feet that had direct contact with the searingly frigid metal floor. The chill seeped through the seat of his trunks, of course, but it was marginally preferable to direct contact.

As long as he could shiver, he could maintain temperature homeostasis, Julian told himself. And the more he shivered, the more kinetic energy he'd convert to heat — not only to warm himself, but to warm the air around him. The cell wasn't large. In fact, his fleeting impression upon being flung inside was that it was scarcely broader than it was deep, and it had been shallow enough that his head had blasted into the back wall while his foot was still in the main body of the cargo bay. It wouldn't take long for a warm-blooded body to warm a space that size. If he could get a clearer measure of the cell's volume, he could estimate more precisely how long it would take for him to warm the room to a bearable temperature.

So he let himself huddle there for three more minutes, carefully measured by his heartbeat. Then Julian eased himself back onto his knees, cringing against the burn of the floor on his naked shins, and started to feel his way along the base of the wall. Making use of his forbidden faculties, of the ill-gotten and almost preternatural gift for precise spatial orientation, Julian measured the wall that held the door.

One hundred ten centimetres, from corner to corner. The adjoining wall, the one that determined the depth to which his head had so jarringly flown, was only ninety-two centimetres deep. Julian navigated the corner, a crisp ninety degrees, and started along the back wall of the cell. His fingertips had not crept even two full decimetres when he felt, beyond the fiery bite of cold metal against sensitive nerves, the slightest tug of resistance as he withdrew his index finger for the next spider-crawl. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, but it happened again on the next movement. His fingertips were sticking, ever so briefly, to the wall.

Julian withdrew his hand, chafing his fingers against his thumb and expecting to feel something gummy: an adhesive, or maybe a syrup. There was no resistance at all, now. He lifted his fingers to his nose, relying on his internal orientation because he could not even see his hand scant millimetres from his face. He sniffed. All he could smell was dead skin and the sour reek that had been clinging to his clothes for weeks. Perplexed, he touched the wall again, all five pads splayed against it. After a count of five, he pulled back. He felt his skin stretch until there was a soft little _pop_ of release from each finger — inaudible, but unmistakable in its vibration. Then, he understood.

The moisture in his skin was freezing upon contact with the back wall. It was a metal surface, a perfect conductor of thermal energy, and the space on the other side was so cold that Julian might have been touching a steel spoon left in a Breen transport freezer.

In a purely academic sense, it was a fascinating phenomenon. Julian had read about such things, but he'd never had much experience with cold weather — or refrigerated food storage, for that matter. Outmoded cryogenic stasis units produced temperatures that could produce such an effect even on glass, which was a far less fertile conductor than tritanium or parsteel. Modern stasis didn't rely on precipitous temperature drops, which posed a significant risk to patients with undiagnosed health problems and provided unreliable longevity of effect, and Julian had never actually used one of the old endothermal units. In other circumstances, he would have been transfixed with this discovery.

Now, however, he could only consider the implications. He had seen the silo from without, even if he hadn't really been examining it in his dread and bewilderment. It sat against the starboard wall of the cargo bay, one long side pressed up against it and the other long side forming the makeshift aisle. That was the side with the doors. He hadn't made an accurate measurement of the thing's dimensions, but it was almost as long as the bay was deep, and at least five metres wide. The cell he was in had been partitioned off from that width at less than a fifth of that. If all the other cells were of similar depth… no, they probably weren't, because the placement of the doors indicated they weren't of uniform width. So supposing the variation was no more than plus or minus a hundred percent — then the remaining volume of the silo, the chamber beyond the frozen wall, was between three and four metres wide, at least forty metres long, and approximately two metres high. A conservative volume estimate, then, was still well over a quarter million litres of empty, unheated space on the other side of this wall.

Surely it was merely unheated space? If it was vented into the vacuum beyond the dome, Julian would freeze to death in a matter of hours. General Martok would never have survived two days in a cell like that. He beat back the panic of that possibility. It was surely, _surely_ just unheated space. But that was bad enough. A human body could heat up a small room to comfort, even to the point of _discomfort_ , readily enough. But Julian couldn't warm a whole cargo container with the byproducts of his rapid metabolism.

If his hypothesis held, the cell was not going to get appreciably warmer, no matter how long he was in here, no matter how much he shivered. Whatever small gains he made would be wicked out through this frozen wall into the hollowness behind it. That awful truth sank in, and left Julian quaking more violently than before. He hugged his ribs, knowing it was useless. And he thought again of Martok.

Klingons could not bear the cold. They were adapted for the insulating atmosphere and geothermal heat of Qo'noS, a planet so much nearer its sun than Earth was that an orbital year was only slightly more than half the length of a Terran one. Even in the barracks, in full armour with his padded garments beneath, with a blanket — however thin — to bundle around himself, the warrior was miserable with the chill of orbital night. It was colder here than in the barracks. How had Martok borne it, as near-naked as Julian was now, for _two days_?

There was no point now in calculating the volume of this box. Yet Julian had begun his survey, and he intended to finish. It was a mighty fall from charting star systems from the bridge of the _Defiant_ , but if this was all the space Julian had to him, he was going to learn every cubic centimetre of it as quickly as possible. He groped his way back to the back lefthand corner, and started along the frozen wall again. He didn't touch it this time, too jealous of his body's heat to squander it. He skimmed along the floor instead, attentive to the chill along his distal phalanges as they moved only a couple of millimetres from what seemed foredoomed to be his chief source of misery. Just in case, he had to make sure that this wall was straight, uninterrupted, and the same length as the one parallel to it.

It was. One hundred and ten centimetres. Julian moved his left hand, intending to plant it on the floor near the corner for leverage as he turned. He shifted his weight in that direction, expecting imminent support. Instead, his palm plunged into empty space, his body tipping too far forward. Before he could comprehend what was happening or arrest his momentum, his brow struck the walls, one side of his frontal bone slamming into each just before the heel of his flexed hand finally hit ground twenty-five centimetres lower than expected, with force enough to jar his carpals. His three longest fingers were bent back uncomfortably, but thankfully not unnaturally, against a smooth, curved wall.

For a disorienting moment, Julian had no idea what had happened. Then he thought he understood. Using his investigative hand to push himself back off the walls, left sinus already feeling noticeably more distended than the right after that brief contact with the frozen metal, Julian groped where his other hand had fallen. He felt what he had expected: the bottom of a cylindrical depression sunken into the floor. It was cold, like all the rest of the room, but it was mercifully dry and apparently clean. The footprint at the bottom was fourteen centimetres in diameter, the sides smooth until just below the level of the floor, where Julian felt a strand of inset lumps: diodes of some kind. They rimmed the circle cut into the floor, and he suspected… he hoped… that they were sanitation diodes. He had found his toilet.

The last wall was also ninety-two centimetres in depth, just like its opposite When he once again reached the wall that held the door, Julian got his feet out from under him and rose into a deep squat. He walked his fingers right into the corner, and began to travel up the wall. He knew what he would find, even before the crown of his head hit the low ceiling, but his common sense seemed to have been scrambled by the hard knocks to the head and the general chaos of this dismal morning. He should have led with his hand, instead of letting it trail below shoulder height as he rose.

Julian bit down on a curse, knowing it was useless and uncertain if there were listening devices in the cell. He hunched his shoulders defensively, dropping his knees into a slight bend as he forced himself to focus on the measurement his hand was making. Basic arithmetic had demanded it: if the silo was two metres tall, and the floor of the cell set twenty-five centimetres above the floor of the tiny cesspit, with an as-yet-unestablished wall thickness to account for above and below, the ceiling simply had to be lower than Julian was tall. Considerably lower, in fact. The final figure, as best he could judge by feel alone, was one hundred sixty-six centimetres. Heel to crown, Julian measured one hundred eighty-two. He couldn't stand up straight.

Such were the dimensions of his cell. It was a footprint about the same width and half a metre less in depth than one of the _Defiant's_ small, economical turbolifts, though they too had their doors on the longer wall. There was nothing Julian could think to compare the height to. A nursery school climbing apparatus, maybe? Cadet Nog would have been able to stand up straight in here, with a generous handspan to spare, but even Major Kira would have had to hunch, and that assuming she was barefoot. Julian was only a little above average height for a human. It wasn't unreasonable to expect to be able to stand upright. And yet here he was.

Again Julian thought of Martok. Some of the cells might be broader, or deeper, or both. But unless they lacked the sunken toilet unit, they could not be taller. Quarters like this, uncomfortably cramped for a human, would surely be downright restrictive for a Klingon warrior. Even with his prominent cranial vault, Martok wasn't that much taller than Julian; he didn't tower over him like Commander Worf always seemed to… or was that an illusion, created by Worf's magisterial confidence contrasted with Martok's long attrition? Could it be that Julian had never truly paused to take an accurate measure of the man's height with his almost laser-precise eye for detail? Was he beginning to question his own judgement, after only an hour, half an hour, an hour and a half? How long had he been in here?

Spent and befuddled, shivering and sore and frightened, Julian rolled his left shoulder back against the seamed but sealed border of the door. He pressed his spine to it, the bare skin of his back breaking out in pilomotor bumps upon contact. This was the warmest of the four frigid walls, he knew: the one that opened on the space that was, however inadequately, actively heated by the life support system. It would be better if he could sit up independently, without sacrificing any of his meagre body heat to the walls, but right now he didn't have the strength. He slid all the way down, slowly, unable to stretch out his legs. His toes slid away from him, colliding with the back wall. It was so cold it seemed to burn him, and he reclaimed his knees as soon as his buttocks hit the floor.

Julian hugged his ribs and tucked his thighs as close to his crossed arms as he was able. He tried to ignore the way his cold hands seemed to scorch the sensitive skin under his arms as he tucked his fingers into the refuge of his axillae. The skin covering his ribs, palpably prominent now with the body mass he'd shed, and over his biceps brachii sent out prickles of protest at the cold contact, but almost immediately his knuckles began to ache less fiercely. He let his chin fall to his chest and closed his eyes. Sleep wouldn't come, not while he was still rigid with latent shivering, setting his jaw to keep his teeth from clacking, but at least he could try to rest a while.

He would gather his strength, and then he'd make a systematic search of the walls, looking for — what? Something? Anything. Anything at all that might help him in this barren little box where for all he knew he had been left to freeze to death. Much as he tried to will away that fear, it gnawed at Julian as he tried to find some way to rest.

_(fade_ )

It was the Major who went to Tain's side, bearing the foil pouch of stewed grain. Martok watched her bend over the Cardassian, speaking quietly to wake him. Tain grunted, squinted at her, and then rolled onto his shoulder with a series of stilted jerks so that he could take the packet. The three who had drawn their miserable ration of indifferent sludge had taken the risk today of passing the makeshift dish between them, so that each contributed a little less than a quarter of their inadequate helping to the old man.

 _We should have done so yesterday as well_ , Major Kalenna had said, bitterly rueful. _It was unjust to let the Doctor bear that burden alone_. She was right, but in the confusion of the ration reduction, it had not occurred to any of them that their prior system of trading off each day was not sustainable when it too two-thirds of the daily allotment to fill the pouch. Martok knew, too, the fear she did not speak: how would the Doctor endure the enforced fast of isolation, when his last meal had amounted to little more than a few mouthfuls?

The hunger had been the least of Martok's own concerns during his hellish sojourn in the black box with its narrow walls and too-low ceiling. But Doctor Bashir's situation was different. Half-blind he might be, but Martok had eye enough to see that the newest addition to the barracks was wasting away more rapidly than any of the rest of them had done. It was a well-known fact that humans had a greater reliance on food than many other species. It was why they did not undertake the sustained ritual fasts that were a cornerstone of Klingon culture, and why it was well-known that blockades of Federation outposts and colonies had proved one of the most effective tactics during the conflicts of a century past.

Watching Tain eat now, boredly sucking the mush from his fingers, Martok wondered if the same strategy had been employed in the current war. The present sophistication of Starfleet's replicator technology had probably pulled the fangs of that particular targ, or he hoped it had. It was not his place to cast judgement upon the choices of the warriors who had gone before him, but Martok son of Urthog saw no honour in starving an opponent into submission. Part of that came, perhaps, from growing up in a simple home where hunger was never more than one failed harvest away. Far more, however, that opinion was coloured by his experiences these last two bitter years. After seeing Ikat'ika and his dishonourable men, day after day, putting half-starved and beaten down prisoners into the ring in the name of combat-readiness, Martok was sickened by the very idea of Klingon warriors using like tactics.

In truth, the very idea of a war with the Federation repulsed him. All his life, during his difficult climb from obscurity to glory, it had been the Klingon Empire's most steadfast ally. Martok had been serving his first tour as a bridge officer, a position he had earned through years of determination and toil on the lower decks, when his Bird of Prey had mustered to the distress call at Narendra III. He had borne witness to the ruins of the Starfleet vessel that had fought to the death to defend the Klingon colony, despite fissures then rife within the longstanding Khitomer Accords. That solemn sight had cemented in Martok's heart — and in the hearts of many throughout the Empire — a belief in the fundamental honour of the peculiar, peace-loving peoples of the United Federation of Planets. Such valour and such selfless sacrifice was not to be forgotten.

How, then, had a Changeling managed to make the Empire forget? It sickened Martok to know what his replacement had done, and he did not know how he would ever redeem his name from such dishonour. He believed the Doctor's account of the war; he would have believed Bashir even if he had claimed the Galaxy had ceased to move in its ageless celestial dance. The honour and courage Martok had witnessed at Narendra paled before that he saw in the Starfleet physician. From the moment he had stepped in to guard Martok from death in the throes of his prison-madness, the Doctor had been a paragon of valour. Even then, when he had believed Martok his avowed enemy, he had fought for him in his unique human manner. That was something the General had contemplated at great length over the last few weeks, and still the awe had not worn thin.

"Where's our stubborn fool?" Tain wheezed. His breathing was laboured, even to Martok's uneducated ear. "Why isn't he in here… hovering?"

The Major glanced at Martok, and Sub-Lieutenant Parvok seemed to shrink in on himself. He had been standing jealous guard over the bottles, waiting for someone to measure out the equitable ration. Martok could not help but feel a flare of irritation at the man's cowardice. The Cardassian could scarcely move, and yet the merest question from him was enough to make Parvok shrink. He was not his compatriot's equal, that was certain.

Major Kalenna had looked briefly at Martok, but she did not defer to him for an answer. She turned stalwartly back to Tain. "He has been taken to isolation," she said, her tone level and unreadable. "Rage against that at your peril, Tain. You know better than we three how much — or how little — strain your heart can bear."

Despite the dour circumstances, Martok felt the ghost of an appreciative smile tug at his scarred and thirst-chapped lips. The woman had courage. He had never known, nor even imagined, that a Romulan could be such a pillar of determination, nor show such loyalty, nor bend her wiles and covert skills towards a common end. It was in the Major's best interest, too, to survive and to engineer the escape. But many of her kind would have proved incapable of laying aside indoctrination and xenophobia in order to ally with a Klingon, with a Cardassian, with a human. Some, like Parvok, lacked the spine. Others, like the bold and ruthless Darok, would have used their cellmates savagely. Major Kalenna had chosen another path, and Martok admired her for it.

Tain squinted at her, glittering eyes all but vanishing in the pouches of loosened, sickly flesh. None of them were as well-built as they had been when first captured, but while the Major had grown wiry and the Doctor had grown gaunt, and Martok's own hard musculature was now more sharply defined, Tain had seemed to deflate. He was no longer the imposing figure he had been upon his arrival in the camp. He was withering from within, devoured by disease and chronic hunger. They would not have needed Doctor Bashir's grim prognosis to know this man was dying: it was written in every sagging line of his weary face.

"What's the point of raging, when the transgressor can't hear you?" he asked Major Kalenna now, still hoarse, chest heaving. "No, my dear, I'll save my breath. I suppose he won my reprieve this morning by surrendering himself to the Vorta? Melodramatic young fool."

Martok's jaw tightened, as it always did when this man spoke scornfully of the only person who cared for his welfare for Tain's sake, instead of for the sake of rescue. Did he think any of them would exert such efforts on his behalf as Doctor Bashir had done? Did he imagine he would be alive now, if not for the Starfleet officer's dedication to his patients and his oath? And yet no matter what he did, Tain looked upon him with contempt. It was a hateful way to speak of one who had been nothing but dedicated to his welfare. The Cardassian was admirably dauntless, determined beyond belief, and clever even by the standards of a notoriously crafty race. But he was without honour.

"I do not know how he won your reprieve," said Kalenna, the only sign of her own anger a further cooling of her tone; "but he did not win it from Deyos. The Doctor was put in isolation for speaking up in protest of the reduced rations."

Tain barked a laugh that cut off abruptly into a high, thin wheeze, and then a series of shallow coughs. He cut them off with one short, sharp hack accompanied by the thump of a fist on his breastbone. He sucked in a thin breath and shook his head.

"I warned him time and again not to complain about the food," Tain grunted, rolling onto his back again and holding out the foil pouch in one lolling hand. The Major bent to take it, snapping back into her haughty posture as if drawn up on a spring. In no other respect did this Romulan woman remind Martok of his beloved Sirella, but they shared the same queenly posture and their courage ran to the same depth — albeit along very different channels.

"He could not be silent," Major Kalenna said, her voice quieter now and her words not meant for the Cardassian. "His patients are suffering."

"Patients!" Tain spat in scorn. But he lacked either the strength or the will to harp further upon the Doctor's so-called failings. He closed his eyes, and his chest rose and fell in three deep, unsteady breaths. "Where's my share of the water?"

"It has not yet been divided," Martok rumbled, feeling the words deep within his ribs. He remembered little of the hell-bound day they had spent locked together in the barracks, but he did remember Tain had feigned selfishness rather than admit his bottles were dry. Such had been his disdain for the method of pooling resources to provide for the common need. Now, it seemed, his tune has changed.

"Well, if you're waiting for Bashir to do it, we'll all die of thirst," Tain muttered at the segmented ceiling, eyes still veiled behind both sets of membrane.

Martok took a step back, opening up the avenue to the bench on which the canteens lay. Four of them, each holding half of a usual daily ration. Divided among five, each of them would have four-fifths of a bottle. Martok lacked the Doctor's quick head for figures, and the Major's meticulous attention to detail, but he was schooled sufficiently in arithmetic to know that without Bashir's portion, each of them would have a mouthful less than they had enjoyed yesterday. There had been one more throat to wet then, but they had been better off. In innumerable ways, they had been better off.

Major Kalenna recovered Tain's empty vessel from under his bunk, and turned to the full ones. She glanced at the Breen as she did so, the silent sentinel seated upon the neighbouring bed. Few were the Breen's actions, but always they were for the good of the barracks. Martok esteemed the noiseless watcher as he never would have expected to. On Qo'noS, it was said that he who hids his face can never know honour. This Breen disproved the old adage. This Breen had been willing to fight at Martok's side yesterday: the General was certain of that.

Parvok cleared his throat, looking slavishly at Kalenna. "Major?" he whispered, although he had to know that the Cardassian's ears were sharp. And it seemed he did know after all, because when she nodded, he asked, "May I speak with you in the corridor? A-And you, General," he added belatedly, with a deferential nod that displeased Martok. Any Romulan might have cause to fear a Klingon warrior, but fear was not ingratiating.

Still, he left the decision to Major Kalenna. The man was her subordinate, not his. She nodded tightly, and Martok moved to the door so that she could follow. It opened with its usual forceful sound. That much could be said of the Dominion: even their doors were bold. It closed with equal vigour, and the three of them were cut off from Tain's vigilant ears.

"What is it?" the Major said softy, looking up the corridor and then out into the central yard. There were a few prisoners wandering out there, fighting the cold that sank into Martok's bones, into his very soul, and set his teeth on edge. He yearned for the steaming closeness of a Bird of Prey, or for the blaze of a ceremonial fire. He would have settled for a thick pelt and the warmth of a loyal targ at his feet. If rescue came, he would be content even with one of the Federation's strange metallic blankets.

If rescue came. _When_ rescue came. He had to believe it was on its way, or at least that Tain's message would soon reach the Wormhole. Starfleet, too, had vigilant ears.

Nevertheless, the walls seemed to press in upon him at that thought. The dome itself, vaulted though it was, was a weight upon his very soul. Imprisoned. Shut in like an animal. _Two years and more_ of odious thralldom. Without the bloody catharsis of the ring, without the Cardassian's mad hope of escape, could Martok have endured so long? He did not believe it. An honourable death had been denied him upon his capture. They had denied it ever since. But it had been those two things — the ring, and the hope of escape — that had permitted Martok to stop trying quite so hard to achieve it. Now, so near the end… there was this.

"I do not think we should give the Cardassian water," said Parvok. "There's not enough for the three of us as it is. He didn't have to stand in line for a share, why should he get one?"

Major Kalenna's eyes narrowed. "Why are you saying this now?" she asked. "You have not complained before."

He had complained. Martok remembered. Or thought he remembered. He knew he could not be certain. Memory, like the passage of time, was nebulous here. Depending upon how his heart pounded on any given day, how difficult it might be to draw ordered breaths, how impossible, it was to let himself forget his captivity, Martok knew he was not always perfectly attentive to the goings-on around him. Certainly he never prioritized the Sub-Lieutenant's words or actions. He was just a Romulan — not the worst of his breed, no, but hardly the best. He was weak. Mediocre. _Typical_. That was it. He was the textbook type: the model of the Romulan taught to schoolchildren throughout the Empire. Unworthy of too much thought, so long as you never trusted him too far. The weak link in the barracks, as his people were the weak link in the Alpha Quadrant.

That last thought, at least, Martok regretted as soon as it formed. He had to remember Major Kalenna. She was unique in his experience, but surely she could not be unique among her people. There must be others as intelligent as she, as dedicated, as ingenious. She was watching Parvok now with measured contemplation, instead of upbraiding him roundly, as he deserved.

"It's different now," Parvok hissed. "He's dying. Whatever we do, he'll be dead in a few days. Why waste the water? The Doctor's not here to argue, or to… _look_ at us."

The last clause came lamely, as if Parvok knew it was an absurd reason to pour good water down the gullet of a dying man. Yet it was not, and Martok thought he knew precisely what the Sub-Lieutenant meant. He had seen that look in Doctor Bashir's eyes himself: reproachful and yet without judgement, the bruised disappointment at a Universe that had failed to live up to his ennobled expectations. It was a powerful weapon, and not one Martok had ever before encountered in his long years of battle and glory. It was, so far as he could tell, undefeatable.

Major Kalenna shook her head. "We will continue to give Tain an equal share of the water," she said firmly. "We will continue to feed him. We _must_ ," she said forcefully, before Parvok could part his lips to voice the protest in his eyes. "First, because we owe that to Doctor Bashir. What do you think he would ask of us? That we care for his patient while he is unable to do so — unable because he has repeatedly stood up in defence of our needs."

Parvok's hand moved to his arm, just below the shoulder, where the copper compound had been infused through garments and skin, deep into the muscle.

"It is a dishonourable way to die, deprived of water, starved of food," Martok added grimly. Had Tain asked it of him, he would have helped the man find a swift death, to end his suffering and erase his infirmity and speed him on to… to wherever Cardassian spirits went when they quit the mortal plane. But Tain had not asked it. Tain did not wish it. What Tain sought was to survive until rescue arrived. Until the Doctor had access to the life-saving equipment and medication Martok knew he craved more than food, more than warmth, perhaps more than life itself. Tain intended to live, and that intent had to be respected. "It is a tactic worthy of the enemy, not of us."

In another place, he and Parvok would have been enemies, staring at one another across a hotly contested Neutral Zone. Here, they had a common foe, a common purpose. Here, however Martok might disdain the man's weaknesses, he was a brother.

"And that is not all," Major Kalenna said tightly. She gripped Parvok's forearm, just below the elbow joint, forcing him to meet her eyes with sheer strength of will. "We do not know when rescue will come. We do not know how long the Doctor will be isolation. He and Tain are the only ones among us who know this Garak we have summoned. If the Cardassian dies, and Garak brings aid before Doctor Bashir is freed, who will persuade him to help us? Who are we to him? To Starfleet? While the Doctor is in isolation, Tain is the only one who can vouch for us. He _must_ live!"

The breath caught high in Parvok's throat. He had not considered this. Nor had Martok, in point of fact. It was a troubling prospect. The Major was correct: only Tain and the Doctor were known to the man called Garak. But the Starfleet officers he would bring with him: they would remember the Klingon General who had laid siege to their station. Far from a struggle to persuade them to help, Martok might find himself in a position of having to defend himself from their overt hostility. He did not fear the prospect, but it troubled him. Dread accrued to his name by his own deeds he could wield with resolve: that was as much a warrior's armour as the mail upon his back. But knowing that it would be owed to the cowardly and treacherous actions of his Changeling replacement? That was sickening. It was a form of violation he could not name, and it hobbled his determination to stand tall.

If Tain died before rescue came, before Doctor Bashir was freed, it would be calamitous.

 _(fade_ )

* * *

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary**

**medial aspect:** the area of an anatomical feature nearest the midline of the body, identified in humanoids as the spinal column.

 **inferior trapezii:** the lower portion of the trapezius muscles, which cover the shoulder blades and much of the upper back.

 **phosphene:** the sensation of seeing lights, often spectacularly multicoloured, when no light is present.

 **dystrophy:** a condition in which tissue degenerates due to genetic predisposition, pathology, or malnutrition.

 **frontal bone:** the thick plate of the skull that forms the human forehead.

 **carpals:** the small bones of the wrist, between the radius and ulna, and the long bones of the hand.

 **biceps brachii:** prominent muscles of the upper arm.

 


	73. The First Voice

**Part XIII, Act II: The First Voice**

When he was done his survey of the walls and the low ceiling, Julian was left with nothing to do but sink to the floor again and resume his shivering. He kept his back to the wall that held the door — moving to the other side of it this time, so that the seam where it met the wall wouldn't leave another itchy, ridged depression down his shoulder blade. The door wasn't set symmetrically in the wall, but far nearer the wall to its right. On the left side, he had space enough to press himself into the corner without overlapping the door. He did so now, drawing his knees close again, and hugged his shins so that he could rest his chin on his knees.

The smaller he made himself, the less he seemed to shiver. Starfleet survival training was largely focused on ingenuity, and on the assumption that whatever the adverse situation, there would be some sort of forage or materiel an officer could turn to their advantage. Julian had been raking through the vast fields of meticulously catalogued and readily retrievable memories of the cold-weather lectures and exercises. He knew how to make a shelter out of a tarp or a tree or a snowbank. He knew the proper phaser settings to use in order to make a rock into a radiant heat source. He'd been taught how to start a fire with everything from a laser torch to a flint lighter to a couple of coarse sticks; and how to weave a crude cape out of wild grass or palm fronds. He could list off and envision in his mind's eye fifty different folds to transform a thermal blanket into a garment of almost any kind. But nothing in all that training had prepared him for the task of staying warm while all but naked in a frigid metal box.

He knew — from one of those unethical hypothermia studies performed in Earth's unsettling and often barbaric past — that a human being could maintain body temperature homeostasis at zero degrees Celsius almost indefinitely, even naked, as long as they could shiver if necessary. He didn't think, but at this point could no longer be certain, that his cell was below freezing. He hypothesized, but couldn't prove, that he'd warmed it a little by his presence, maybe enough to outweigh by a few kilojoules the loss of heat through the icy back wall. He could hope. But he couldn't yet feel it, and he didn't think he could go on shivering forever.

His examination of the walls in their entirety had taught him little about his surroundings that he did not already know. On each of the walls flanking the one that held the door, there was a depression at a height of one point three metres, three decimetres in from the corner. These depressions were rectangular, twenty-five by twenty centimetres, and obscured at a depth of two millimetres by another plate of metal — not tritanium, but something with a sufficient tensile strength that Julian could not dent or otherwise compromise them by pounding with his fists. He had tried, in case he'd found a weak spot in the design of the cell, but there was no weak spot. The Dominion had taken that into account, probably with far stronger species in mind. The hatches, if that was what they were, could withstand an unequipped prisoner's assault.

Julian suspected that they _were_ hatches, and were designed to allow the Jem'Hadar to provide the prisoners with whatever rations they were permitted, without disrupting the perfect darkness of the cell. He knew better than to expect any food. Gul Nador's cellmate had been in isolation for three Dominion days — more than a hundred hours — and had been given nothing to eat in all that time. Yet he _had_ been allowed water, though he had been unable to say how much or how frequently. Even his disciplined Cardassian mind had lost all sense of the passage of time.

In that respect, at least, Julian had an advantage. He had a broader auditory range than he had any right to have, and although he was certainly no match for a Ferengi, his ears were more sensitive, too. He had heard the klaxon summoning the prisoners to ration call a little while ago, muffled by distance and bulkhead and airlocks, but unmistakable. If he was careful, attentive, he could listen for the day's three benchmarks: the count, the rations, and the curfew. That would give him some structure to cling to. Some way to know how long he'd been in here.

It was an imperfect system. Awake and alert, he'd had to strain to make out the sound. It would never penetrate his sleep, if he ever managed to relax far enough to drift off despite the cold. But it was something, and Julian was prepared to gather to himself all the _somethings_ he could. He'd have to, if he was going to stay sane.

The only other feature of this miserable box was on the back wall, just below the ceiling. There was a grate there, fine perforations opening on a ventilation tube of unknown dimensions. That, Julian knew, was so that he did not suffocate on his own carbon dioxide. It was a forced-air system: when he had wetted a finger with his sparse saliva, he had felt the faintest breeze. It was a relief to know that there were signs on all sides that this was not designed to be a death chamber. The vent, the toilet pit, the hatches: these were all meant for prisoner maintenance, not destruction.

He was particularly invested in the hatches. It had now been more than thirty-four hours — how much more he did not dare to guess — since he had drawn his miserable one-litre ration. He'd drunk every drop of his estimated eight hundred thirty-three millilitre share long before the count, unable to make it last as the full ration normally did. He was distractedly thirsty now, and it would only get worse. He hadn't even felt the need to urinate yet, and though he wasn't looking forward to doing so in the facility available, he knew the absence of the impulse at this point was not a good sign. It had been weeks of chronic, subclinical dehydration spiking to the occasional crisis. He had no reserves to draw on.

His cellmates would have less water today, with one less person to draw a share. He hoped the others would do the right thing, and ensure Tain still got a portion. Julian thought they would, but he supposed there was really no way to know. Tain's work was done; the message was sent. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that someone — probably Parvok — would question the need to provide for him. But surely Kalenna and Martok would overrule such a protest, if it arose. Tain had to live. He had to.

 _Does he_? The thought was fleeting, but so clear that it might have been a voice speaking aloud into the darkness. Julian's eyes shot open, although he had not realized they were closed. There was nothing to see: no way to tell the difference with his optic nerves. And he knew no one was there. Certainly not the person he had thought he'd heard.

 _Does he really, my dear Doctor?_ the thought that spoke with Garak's voice asked again, silky with amusement. _You know what it means if he does. If you save him. If he returns with you to Deep Space Nine. You know what he's promised to do. Enabran Tain always keeps his promises_.

Julian couldn't help a bitter little laugh at this. It sounded strange in the tight, barren space, and it made his parched throat sting. He knew he shouldn't answer these thoughts, neither aloud nor in his mind. It was only encouraging a pathological neural pattern imprinted in his reasoning pathways as a consequence of the telepathic assault he had suffered just before his thirtieth birthday. Before then, it had been rare for his thoughts to personify themselves as the voices of people he knew.

Oh, he often remembered things others had said as if they were repeating them again in his mind, but that was different: recollection, not extrapolation. And all through his life until the attack, the harshest of his inner voices had liked to take on the intonations of his father. But it was a documented psychological phenomenon that most people had an "inner parent" that represented a guiding voice — either positive or negative — in their minds. This was different. This always reminded him of the Lethean's labyrinth of inner torment, when every facet of his personality had been anthropomorphized as a familiar face, and he had wandered through a Deep Space Nine of his own creation, searching for the source of murmuring voices that had in fact been the tendrils of the real world penetrating his comatose mind.

In the Lethean's hallucination, Garak had been an adversary: an extension of Altovar. Now, he seemed to be expressing Julian's darkest dread; wholly his, but hellish in a way the Lethean trance had never quite been. Julian had managed, instinctively perhaps or by virtue of the changes wrought to his brain during the enhancement procedures, to conceal the truth about himself from his assailant. Altovar had managed to prod the edges of the tumour that was the knowledge of what his parents had had done to him, dredging up truths like the throwing of his oral final in medical school or the fear that had lead to Julian abandoning his dream of a tennis career. But he'd never tapped the core: the calculation that had gone into that botched answer, and the true source of the fear. He had never found his victim's knowledge of his true nature.

Julian still did not know how he'd managed to protect that part of his mind from the incursion, when he hadn't even been aware at first that it was happening. He had no idea if Altovar would have been able to access the knowledge himself during their brief period of actual contact, instead of merely to his insidious echo that had gone on to torment Julian for hours. He could not speculate what Altovar might have done with that information, out in the real world, if he'd gained it. But he was certain what Enabran Tain meant to do with it, and so was this version of Garak's voice.

In the Lethean's labyrinth, his Cardassian friend had been a foe. Now, he was a manifestation of Julian's own darkest dread and the thought he could not allow himself to articulate. He was not at all sure that was an improvement.

 _You of all people should know that's not true,_ he tried, as if speaking to Garak face-to-face. _Tain doesn't keep his promises. Following through on a threat is not the same thing_.

 _Is that really the point, Doctor?_ the Garak-voice countered indulgently. _He's poised to destroy you. Is it really the time to reflect on his attempts to destroy_ me _?_

Maybe it was. Intrigue and a lust for adventure and perhaps a touch of youthful recklessness had drawn Julian to Garak in the early days. But as their friendship had evolved and he had learned more about his friend's past — or the scattered layers of tangle half-truths, oblique allusions, and outright falsehoods he presented as his past — Julian had found something else that fascinated him. Not in the eager, intellectual way the rest of Garak did, where he was equal parts a psychological conundrum and a walking spy thriller, but in a far more pathological sense. Like a dog licking constantly at a sore place, or a man prodding a festering wound in his own side, Julian had returned again and again to the study of Garak the exile.

He had watched his efforts to disguise his discontent, to mask his misery even from himself — not just by tampering with his endorphin implant, but with his games and his sarcasm and his biting wit. Julian had seen the awful moments when those distractions failed, and he had borne witness to the times when Garak found life aboard Deep Space Nine almost bearable. Usually he didn't let himself dwell on why he made such a study of this, soothing himself with the reassurance that it was natural to be watchful of a friend's welfare. In part, that was true: there weren't many things in life Julian did that were wholly severed from his innate compassion. But there was a darker allure at play.

Julian studied Garak's coping mechanisms because he was learning from them, preparing himself because he knew — had always known, since the day a fifteen-year-old's world had imploded around him — that one day _he_ might be faced with a similar plight. The Federation did not exile people in the legal sense. But in a functional respect… yes. One day it might be he, Julian Bashir, driven away from his home, ostracized from the planet of his birth, cast adrift in some unfamiliar and undesirable place far from everyone and everything he loved. Garak's ongoing survival wasn't just a lesson, but a fallback; the one slender reassurance that perhaps the unthinkable was not the end.

But never, in waking fears or in his nightmares, had Julian imagined his downfall and Garak's might be brought about by the same man.

 _He's dying. You know it_. The voice again, dry and faintly singsong, so much like the tailor's. _And you're not there to look after him_.

Julian tried to close his mind to that thought, and the sense of profound failure that came with it. In standing up for the needs of the multitude of patients in need, he had deprived the one whose only hope was constant care and timely rescue of his physician. It had been the right thing to do, the only thing to do. But…

He shifted his position on the cold, unyielding floor, and struggled not to think.

 _(fade_ )

On the diurnal-nocturnal border of the planet known as Remus, there was a region of perpetual twilight. Neither cast wholly in darkness, nor wholly in sunlight, it was a netherworld of indistinct shadows and intangible boundaries. Sometimes, when driving the shade-goats to fresh pasture in the indistinct days of her turbid adolescence, Kalenna Varak had wondered if it was possible to lose oneself entirely in the indecision of the world. She had felt as if she herself were fading, melting into the grey-blue gloom of the landscape to haunt the place that was neither dawn, nor dusk, nor anything at all — because it was immune to change.

There had come a time in Internment Camp 371 when that old, haunted sensation had returned to her.

The grinding monotony of the days, strung together by the barest skeleton of routine — the releasing of the doors, the count, ration call, and finally curfew — had a numbing effect on mind and spirit. It ground down resolve, and the will to defy the Dominion. It was not an unfamiliar tactic: the Tal Shiar employed similar techniques in their detention centres, and Kalenna had watched the most belligerent of prisoners bend to it. Yet somehow she had never considered that she might be so vulnerable herself. In the interminable months after General Martok lost his eye, there had been little to break up the days but the occasional thrill of terror if one of the guards happened too near the barracks door while Enabran Tain was in the wall.

The arrival of the Starfleet officer had changed all that. With his coming, Kalenna had found new purpose; first in tending to his drug-induced sickness and later his injuries in the ring, and then in following his lead as he began to disrupt the Order of Things. She would have liked to have seen Doctor Julian Bashir mount a full-scale revolt — as she thought he might well have done, without the prospect of imminent escape. He had brought vitality and purpose to a place where there had been only the slow crawl of despair and the desperate hope that, perhaps, the Cardassian was every bit as adept as he claimed to be.

Adept Tain was, but he never would have gotten the message out without the Doctor's aid. Watching him from the far side of the narrow barracks, Kalenna thought the old man liked to forget that. The vital distraction that had drawn the Vorta to the arena and away from his computer while Tain grafted his unit onto the power grid would have been contribution enough. The Starfleet codes and coordinates Bashir had been able to provide would likely make the difference between Tain's message being sorted, flagged, and passed on as he hoped; and it floating for an eternity in subspace, lost in the background chaos of disparate signals from a thousand Gamma Quadrant worlds. If the message reached the Bajoran space station at the far mouth of the Wormhole, it would be in no small part thanks to his assistance.

Her keenly trained mind and well-exercised memory were not infallible enough to leave Kalenna confident she could assemble an accurate tally of the ways in which the human had improved all of their lives. General Martok was another example. She had watched him fading, day by day, worn down by his injuries in the ring and the ceaseless pain that dogged every waking hour between bouts. The Klingon warrior never complained. She supposed it was a point of pride _not_ to complain. But she had seen the anguish in his every step, and the cautious way he held himself even in the most unguarded moments in the barracks. She had witnessed the flagging of his stamina, and the deterioration of his performance in the ring. She had done what she could to tend injuries far beyond her expertise to assess, bereft even of rudimentary first aid equipment.

Then the Doctor had come, with his determination and his faultless dedication to his patients. Kalenna had seen him do things with a strip of blanket and his skilled hands that a Romulan physician would have struggled to do with a full battlefield medkit. And he had done it all without undermining Martok's pride — as battered as his body after two years of humiliation and defeat. That was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all.

Kalenna had still not taken the time within herself to assess the ways Doctor Bashir had affected her own life. The reborn purpose was one thing, and highly to be valued, but there was more. The night she had gone out to console him after his mysterious altercation with Tain over a dark secret that still, for all the Cardassian's threats just before his most recent cardiac event, she had found herself consoled instead. She had never imagined confiding the truth about her beloved and her child to anyone, much less a starry-eyed Federation boy who insisted upon living his people's impossible ideals even when faced with a dispassionate savagery even the Tholians would envy. Kalenna's love and the family it had built were a secret she had kept from friends, from handlers, from superiors, even from her aged father who had gone to his death among his goats never knowing he was a grandsire. Yet she had told Bashir.

Not all, of course. It would have been too much to tell him all. But he had not asked it of her, either: content with what she felt able to confide. Their names, most of all, Kalenna still clutched to herself: a final protection cast like a cloaking device over the centre of her being.

Was it truly possible that soon she would be on her way home, to Romulus and Livrana and their modest house in the peaceable suburbs that surrounded the University? And Kalen… her beautiful baby boy who bore her name because he could bear nothing else of hers: not her genes, nor her family legacy (such as it was), nor her public acknowledgment. It seemed a lifetime to her, since last she'd held him in her lap and read to him, or chased him 'round the garden, or helped him fly a kite. To him? It was an eternity.

Tain stirred, snorted, coughed once with his usual brutish force. Doctor Bashir had said he did so to stabilize the rhythm of his heart. If it did not work, Kalenna was determined to try the breathing technique that had worked more than once before. She'd seen the physician coach Tain through it. Most of the actual labour seemed to be on the Cardassian's side of things. And she couldn't deny she'd take cool pleasure in clamping a hand over his mouth and pinching his nostrils shut, forcing Enabran Tain into the subordinate position for once.

Kalenna knew that thought would have dismayed Doctor Bashir. It was as well he could not hear it, because she had no wish to pain him. She might respect his Starfleet ideals and his lofty Federation ethics, but she was still a Romulan. She spared no pity for her enemies, not even those made allies by grim necessity. Tain was a viper, grown fat not through indolence but through overfeeding — overhunting. He was deadly and he was soulless, and Kalenna refused to forget that even now as he lay dying.

The entente with Tain was expedient, and continued to be so, but it was fundamentally unnatural. Unnatural in a way that Kalenna's alliance with General Martok was not, although many among her people looked far more askance at her association with the Klingon. Sub-Commander Darok and his men could appreciate the Cardassian's subtlety and his ruthless wiles. But all of them had been brought up (as had Kalenna herself) to believe the Klingons were their natural adversaries. Their two species were held to be utterly incompatible in nature, philosophy, and behaviour.

Kalenna knew things most Romulan citizens did not, with regard to the _compatibility_ between their two peoples. There were things she had learned as a Tal Shiar operative that could not be widely disseminated to the population. Yet biology was irrelevant to her comradeship with the General. Their ruse of romantic affinity was for the benefit of the Vorta alone, and it had served them well. What held them together in adversity was a mutual regard: respect for one another's skills, ingenuity, determination, and integrity. Martok spoke of honour. It meant very different things to each of them, and yet they had come to an earnest appreciation of each other's strength. Kalenna admired the battered warrior. She believed she had his admiration in return.

The door screeched open, still an ear-bruising sound even after such long familiarity. The General himself, returning from his fruitless wandering. Kalenna had feared the First would take the opportunity to put him in the ring. Had it been Deyos, rather than Ikat'ika, who found the Klingon fascinating, that probably would have been the course of events today. The malicious commandant would have enjoyed watching the warrior cope without his physician to aid him — if he cared at all. Deyos did not care, and Ikat'ika's interest never manifested as spite.

Kalenna did not know if the Jem'Hadar were capable of such an impassioned frame of mind. Nor did she know if this made them admirable, or contemptible. She resented the Jem'Hadar because she feared them, but she hated the Vorta. Hated him for his smug smiles and his thinly-veiled entendres. Hated him for his petty games and his insatiable appetite for the misery of others. Hated him because her belly was empty and her throat dry, and he was to blame for both. And she hated him because Doctor Bashir was not here, where he was needed, where he was wanted, because he'd had the temerity to speak up for the needs of others.

"How is he?" Martok muttered, speaking out of one corner of his mouth. His eye was on the far cot, and Tain's shrunken but still hulking form. But for the Breen, silent as ever, they were alone.

"Still breathing," said Kalenna. _But for how much longer?_

She did not say the words, but they filled her with dread. She knew Starfleet's reputation, a reputation that she — like the rest of the Romulan Star Empire — had believed inflated, a masterful work of soft power and propaganda that penetrated to every corner of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. She had believed that such altruism, generosity, and selflessness could not exist in the real world. They were the stuff of children's tales, the prideful illusion of a prideful people… or a confederation of a thousand prideful peoples. Then she had met Julian Bashir.

But what if he was the exception? What if the comrades of which he spoke so wistfully were cut of a different cloth, a more pragmatic cloth? A Romulan officer would not risk self or subordinates to liberate a hive of ancestral foes. Why should a Starfleet rescue party? And that was assuming this Garak recruited aid from among the crew of the starbase, as the Doctor seemed to think he would. He might just as easily enlist a crowd of Nausicaan mercenaries. Even if Starfleet proved half as benevolent as their finest emissary, now languishing in isolation, what Cardassian would?

"How long, do you think?" Martok asked.

Kalenna looked up at him in sudden astonishment. Had he read the question in her mind? But the General was no longer looking at Tain. His eye had wandered off to the left instead, towards the bulkhead beyond which lay the next couple of barracks pods and, ultimately, the airlock to the storage areas where the isolation cells lay. He was not thinking of the Cardassian's death, but of the human's release.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Two days is the average. Three is not uncommon." She doubted even Deyos would be cruel enough to let the Doctor sit there longer, without food, with a half-ration of water. And would it be a proper half-ration, the same as the rest of them received this morning? Or a half of the half-ration? On such a portion, even one day would be perilous enough.

"Three days…" Martok muttered. He had been on edge all day, and Kalenna suspected he was haunted by the memory of his own stint in isolation. She wondered, sometimes, if he would not sooner have fought to the death than allow himself to be thus confined. Had she not extracted from him the vow, as the hauled him away, that he would survive to return to his barracks… would he have submitted at all?

"It is too long," the General growled. He took two purposeful strides, as if to start pacing. Then he rethought the prospect and sat down heavily on the near bench instead. As he always did, he angled his knees broadly and hitched his compromised hip a little higher than the one that did not pain him. Bashir's diligent coaching in the physical therapy stretches had brought about visible improvement in the joint, but it was anything but healed. "We should attempt a rescue."

"We should do nothing… nothing of the sort," wheezed Tain from his cot. Kalenna had not realized he was awake, but she knew better than to be surprised. "Have you taken leave of your senses? Do you want to wind up in the box next to his? This is the problem…" he huffed heavily, sagging back from his half-hearted attempt to roll in towards them. He blinked up at the ceiling. 'The problem with delusions. They're contagious. The Doctor's gone and sacrificed himself so _nobly_ , and now you want to do it as well. While I'm well aware Klingons love their mad quests, General, I'll thank you to remember…"

His voice trailed off in a thin wheeze, and his chest heaved and twitched. Martok glanced back at him, eye narrowed. Kalenna, suppressing a sigh, rose to her feet and went to the sickbed. Beads of pernicious perspiration were trickling down Tain's orbital ridges and pooling in the spoon-like crest in the centre of his forehead. He was trembling, although even in this bitter cold on the dark side of the gas giant the Cardassians did not shiver to warm themselves. Kalenna reached to feel for his pulse, as she had seen the Doctor do countless times.

Tain submitted to the gesture, and that was astonishing enough. Still more so, he did not attempt to continue his pontification while Kalenna counted the palpitations of his pulse beneath the clammy skin. The number meant nothing to her. It was slower than her own, and she was young and fit. She had never thought to ask Bashir what he looked for when he did this. It had never occurred to her that she might have to care for this difficult patient in the physician's stead.

"And I'll thank _you_ to remember that it was one of your speeches that brought on the last attack," she said at last, because acerbity was the only sort of competence she could bring to this situation. "Try to stay quiet, and give your heart time to rest. It's more important to stay alive than to win every argument."

"Ah, but what's the point of living," Tain asked in a semblance of his old lilting, grandfatherly voice; "if you can't win?"

( _fade_ )

No water.

Still, they had brought him no water. Julian had just heard the klaxon for curfew, followed by the muffled and unintelligible command of a Jem'Hadar over the intercom system, offering a last warning before lockdown that did not really afford enough time for anyone to take cover. In the barracks, his cellmates would be redistributing the blankets Tain had used all day, and stretching out on their cots to sleep. He envied them with an intensity that awakened his ravenous nausea afresh. He envied them the blankets. Envied their ability to lie down flat and stretch their limbs. Envied them the lights that would not dim to let them rest peaceably. Envied them that day's miserable, reduced ration of mush. Envied them, most of all, the five canteens with their slender water supply.

His mouth felt like sandpaper, and his throat stung when he tried to swallow what little sticky saliva his glands could produce. His lips were cracked, and beginning to chap from the chill. And he was shivering. Every muscle ached. Julian was utterly exhausted by the effort to keep warm, and by the dark, rambling thoughts that he could not escape. How long could the Vorta leave him here, in the cold and the darkness without even the meagre water ration the other prisoners were allowed? How long before one privation or another took their final toll?

He couldn't think anymore. Couldn't fret anymore. Couldn't maintain this position anymore, pressed into the corner with his shoulders rounded and his knees drawn up and his hands tucked into his armpits. Julian dreaded the idea of putting one whole side of his body in contact with the cold floor, but right now that was the lesser of two torments. He had to lie down, even if he couldn't really stretch out. He eased himself onto his side, distantly aware of the tight whimper of dismay that passed his lips as his sensitive flank met the scored metal surface. He hitched one curled arm up under his head, a crude and bony pillow. He used the other to exert a careful band of pressure across his floating ribs, hoping that might quiet his stomach a little. Open or shut, his eyes saw only blackness, but the force of habit was strong. Julian closed them.

And tried to sleep.

_(fade)_


	74. Imperfect Distractions

_Note: Health problems continue, and the writing is suffering accordingly. I'm behind on replies and correspondence, too, but I know you're all so sweet about that! Enjoy the chapter! Er… enjoy?_

_Excerpts from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797-98. Excerpts from "When We Were Very Young", copyright A.A. Milne, 1924._

**Part XIII, Act III: Imperfect Distractions**

It was impossible to sleep very deeply. He could slip into shallow slumber, all right, sodden and heavy as an EV suit on a Jovian world, but every time his mind tried to reach for the merciful prize that lay beyond Stage 2, Julian would jerk awake again, shivering violently. He could gauge how desperately he needed the restoration of REM sleep by the fact that it took four such wretched awakenings before he realized why it was happening. Every time he reached the point where his muscles released their tension and his body temperature began to drop, he grew too cold. His hypothalamus, rightly panicked, sent out the urgent command to shiver. The resulting physiological response startled him awake. Then exhaustion dragged him down again, and the cycle began anew.

He tried to compensate, gathering his limbs closer and hugging himself tighter, pressing his back to the warmest of the four frigid walls, trying to prepare his mind for the inevitable return of tension so that it didn't feel the need to alert him quite so harshly. It was no use. Again and again he drifted, again and again he was yanked back.

During one such interval of wakefulness, his sensitive ears caught the klaxon summoning the prisoners to the count. The night was behind him. He had been in here now thirty-four hours: a full Dominion Standard Day. He spared a moment of gratitude that each alert sounded different: there was no question of which one he was hearing. But the awareness of just how long he'd been in here suddenly made him conscious of the need to stretch his limbs.

There was no way to do so properly, but he rolled onto his back on the patch of floor warmed markedly but far from adequately by his body. Fresh gooseflesh erupted on his chest and shins and arms as a much broader area of skin made contact, but Julian forced himself to lie still, untidy hair just grazing the left wall. He slid one leg up the right, until his knee was extended and only the back of his heel rested on the cold metal. The other leg followed slowly, and Julian tried to convince himself that the deliberateness of the motion somehow made it more satisfying.

While taking his preliminary degrees at the Academy, he had used the time saved by ultrarapid speed reading and unnaturally excellent recall to the pursuit of mental and physical disciplines aimed at enhancing the holistic health of the practitioner. He had studied rhythmic breathing and the attendant forms of meditation under the redoubted Isam Helewa. He had tried his hand at several sophisticated Vulcan techniques, and the Betazoid concept of Utmost Quietude. Often such philosophies incorporated contemplative stretching and traditional body poses to enhance energy, build flexibility, and foster a sense of spiritual wellbeing. The human discipline of yoga was one example — and at almost three thousand years of age, a venerable one — but Julian had engaged in several others as well.

In the end, he had settled on the straightforward, anatomy-based flexibility regimen that was an essential pillar of his evening routine at home. Or it had been: after so many weeks away, Julian was beginning to forget what it was like to enjoy the simple daily habits of freedom. But even though he no longer practiced meditative movement, Julian remembered the serenity and the comfort that came from smooth, steady control of muscles and lungs and mind. If he could pretend these awkward manoeuvres were purposeful instead of desperate, maybe that would help him feel less cornered.

It didn't. When he finally had both legs straight, and shimmied his hips a little closer to the wall so he could feel the stretch in his hamstrings and gastrocnemii, Julian only felt the restrictions of his environment more keenly. He kept coming back to the idea of sprawling like a starfish across a soft, clean bed; or standing up on tiptoe to stretch towards a grilled ceiling well out of reach. He thought about blankets, too, to burrow under while he curled into a ball against the cold or to kick off carelessly because in that imagined room, tens of thousands of light-years away, the temperature defaulted to nineteen degrees, and could be adjusted at a whim. He missed his quarters, missed their spacious luxury, their soothing familiarity, their promise of freedom. And he missed the clean, abundant, filtered air that neither burned his throat with its chill nor tormented his nostrils with its stench.

He'd had to avail himself of the pit in the floor some hours ago. If the nodes beneath its rim were indeed a sanitation unit, he could not figure out how to activate them — and if they were meant to activate of their own accord upon contact with humanoid waste, they were deactivated or malfunctioning. His underfed and dehydrated body hadn't been able to pass much of anything, but the reek of what little it had was pungent even on the cold air. The sickly stench of highly concentrated urine was the worst, souring in his sinuses and burning on the back of his tongue. It was a constant reminder not only of the lengths his body was going to in order to keep from poisoning itself with its own metabolic byproducts, but of the thirst that was clawing at his sanity more savagely than darkness ever could.

It was far beyond mere discomfort now. It was torture. Julian's mouth was lined in sandpaper, broken only here and there by vile-tasting scorbutic lesions along his gumline. His tongue felt swollen to twice its natural size and his teeth and palate were sticky. Every muscle in his body was tensed with dehydration, and now and then a painful spasm would ripple through his forearm or his neck or the middle of his back. His eyes were dry, his lips were riven in deep fissures at the corners of his mouth, and there was a nauseating, pancreatic pain deep within him.

His left flank. His left kidney, savagely avulsed weeks ago during his brutal bout in the ring. Tiellyn had stopped the bleeding that might well have proved fatal, and time had allowed the torn organ to mend significantly. But it was improbable, if not outright impossible, that the kidney had healed completely in that interval. Not without corrective surgery and perhaps aggressive resection. The human body was a remarkable machine, but there was only so much it could do unaided. Julian's had healed itself far enough that he had not been troubled by his kidney in over a fortnight, but not far enough that the battered organ could endure such desperate dehydration.

Julian pinched the fleshy part of his forearm, holding for five seconds — or what he believed was five seconds, time was a nebulous thing in the darkness — before releasing. He felt, or thought he felt, the unnaturally slow crawl of the flesh as it eased out of the little hill he'd forced it into. Not satisfied with the vagueness of that assessment, wishing angrily that he could see, he raised his arm to his face. This time, when he released his pinch, he brushed his lips against the place he'd grabbed. He could feel the mound linger for a measurable interval, instead of springing back immediately to taut flatness. His lips were better able to gauge that than his fingertips: his fingertips were numb with cold.

So his skin turgor was poor. That wasn't a good sign. It was a patently bad one, in fact. It took a great deal to compromise the skin turgor of an adult, even one who'd been courting chronic mild-to-moderate dehydration for over a month. How long had it been since his last mouthful of water, out of the meagre half-ration that had driven him to his latest rebellion? Julian didn't know anymore. He couldn't even hazard a guess.

"Too long," he whispered, his hoarse voice almost deafening in the silence of the isolation cell. With a painful croak, Julian cleared his throat and forced a little more volume into his voice. "Can you hear me?" he rasped, larynx burning and tonsils raw. "I need water. I'll die without it. If…"

He couldn't finish the sentence: _if the Founders want me alive, you have to give me water_. He couldn't manage it. His throat was too dry, his thoughts too scattered. And besides, he didn't even know if Deyos was listening.

_He's not_. This voice, flat and bitter, was Major Kira's. She spoke for the part of Julian's mind that he called cynical, but she — the real Nerys, not his imaginary construct of her — called realistic. The part of his mind that knew better than to expect mercy from an adversary who had never shown the remotest inclination towards it. _Even if there's a monitoring device, and he can hear you, he's not_ listening _to anything you say. He'll give you water, or he won't: you won't persuade him either way._

_They can't just leave me here to die_ , Julian protested weakly, sliding his left leg back down the wall and tucking the heel up near his buttock. He rotated his hip joint slowly, cupping his palm on the inside of his knee, as he lowered his lateral thigh to the floor another futile stretch.

_Yes, they can_ , Kira said dourly. _But you don't need to help them do it. What do you need to do, if you don't know where your next drink of water is coming from — or when?_

"Conserve," Julian breathed, letting the word fill his ears as if it might hold more power that way, more resolve. He had to conserve his body's diminished store of water. But how?

His options were limited. The temperature was in his favour: no chance of perspiring excessively while he sat all but naked in a room hovering just around freezing. He was wasting no water on digestion, for he'd been fasting longer than he'd been dry. Stay out of direct sunlight? That was laughable. He couldn't cover himself to reduce evaporation of moisture from his skin, either, and he couldn't get out of the faint, cold draft seeping from the ventilation grate and quickening that same process.

Two things to do, then: stay as still as possible, and start breathing through his nose again.

Julian slid his other leg down, considered his position and its sustainability, and rolled onto his side so that he could sit up gently and settle his back into the corner again. The wall had cooled, and he had to endure another rib-constricting shock as he adjusted to the change. He drew up his left knee close to his chest and stretched his right leg out towards the pit in the far corner. At least on the hypotenuse, he could straighten it with room to spare — so long as he was seated. He thought he could convince himself he was comfortable in this position, at least for a while. And for longer than that, he could force himself to hold it in the name of avoiding exertion.

Slowly, Julian ran his dry tongue over still drier lips. It brought no relief, and it was difficult to close his mouth — still more difficult to keep it closed. It wasn't just the way that breathing through his nostrils seemed to intensify both the stench of effluence and the chill of the air. It made him more conscious of the dryness of his buccal tissue and the way he could feel every one of his papillae against his hard palate. He could taste blood, and it took him far too long to figure out which of the gum lesions were bleeding. He didn't want this level of awareness of _any_ part of his body, much less the part that had become a temple to his dehydration.

Far away, he heard the harsh bleat of ration call. Julian's stomach clenched. His hunger had been superseded by thirst and cold. Now it awakened with a vengeance. Sixty-eight hours since he'd eaten, and it wasn't as if he'd been adequately fed even then. He hugged his left leg closer to his abdomen, trying to exert pressure to quiet the dissatisfied organ even though he knew it was pointless. If his body had been capable of modulating its ghrelin response, it would have done so long ago.

His jaw burned, and it took Julian a moment or two to realize his body was trying to salivate. It managed it, too: a little sluggish, too-thick fluid oozed into his mouth, and his tongue promptly rolled to spread it as much as possible. It was inadequate to alleviate his discomfort, of course, and although he knew it was purposeless, Julian closed his eyes. Tightly enough, in fact, that the brightly coloured flashes of perceived light started up in a haunting gavotte behind his lids.

He needed a distraction, needed one desperately, and he couldn't turn to his usual standby of medicine and anatomy. He needed to forget about his body for a while, not break down every cramping muscle or stiffened joint. What he needed was fiction, an illusion, a good story.

Julian had memorized his share of poetry as a child: some for school assignments, more simply because it was so easy for his brain to latch on to rhyme and rhythm. Even before the enhancements, he remembered learning a little poem, painstakingly, simply because he loved it so much and wanted to be able to carry it with him wherever he went, even when there was nobody patient enough to read to him.

_John has great big waterproof boots on;_  
_John has a great big waterproof hat;_  
_John has a great big waterproof mackintosh—  
_ _And that (Said John) is That._

Julian shook his head in the blackness. Milne was no good. too short and simplistic, for one thing: not nearly enough to occupy even a fraction of his mind. But it also reminded him too much of Kukalaka, and that made the homesickness more intolerable than ever.

What he needed was an epic. Something long and complex and engaging, that could capture the imagination and transport him far away from his present miseries. _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ , he decided. Perfect. Thirty-eight hundred words long (thirty-eight hundred twenty seven, in fact, not counting the Part numbers), at least fifteen minutes of recitation time, if he could slow his thoughts to the rate of dramatic speech, and free of anything that might make him ache for Deep Space Nine. Julian gathered his thoughts and began, running the poem through his mind as carefully as if reciting it aloud to a room full of listeners.

_It is an ancient Mariner,  
_ _And he stoppeth one of three.  
_ ' _By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,  
_ _Now wherefore stopp'st though me?_

_The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,  
_ _And I am next of kin…_

_And through the drifts the snowy clifts_  
_Did send a dismal sheen:_  
_Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—  
_ _The ice was all between._

_The ice was here, the ice was there,_  
_The ice was all around:_  
_It cracked and growled and roared and howled,  
_ _Like noises—_

That wasn't it. He'd skipped ahead. Quite a ways ahead, too, and just because his toes were burning with cold and his knuckles ached in his armpits and his jaw couldn't stop shuddering against the urge to let his teeth chatter didn't mean that was excusable. Julian clenched tighter — not only his jaw, but his whole shivering body, and went back to the beginning.

_The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,_  
_And I am next of kin;_  
_The guests are met, the feast is set:  
_ _May'st hear the merry din.'_

_Day after day, day after day,_  
_We stuck, nor breath nor motion;_  
_As idle as a painted ship  
_ _Upon a painted ocean._

_Water, water, every where,_  
_And all the boards did shrink;_  
_Water, water, every where,  
_ _Nor any drop to…_

A noise of animal frustration tore from Julian's parched throat, and he kicked out his left foot towards his right, yanking his hand away from his ribs to smack it into the door beside him. He'd done it again, damn it, and jumped dozens of stanzas ahead to one of the most famously evocative poetic depictions of thirst in Earth's Western canon. Why the hell hadn't he remembered this damned poem was built around the very miseries he was living out right now? Throw in a verse about the sneering Vorta in the distance, and it'd be bloody perfect.

Milne it was, then. Pining for his bear, who had been his mainstay through most of the darkest periods of his life up to this point and who was currently residing in comfort in Leeta's quarters, was preferable to wallowing in his present predicament. Julian tipped back his head to rest on the wall and stared unseeing into the blackness of the cell.

_Whenever I walk in a London street,_  
_I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;_  
_And I keep in the squares,_  
_And the masses of bears,  
_ _Who wait at the corners all ready to eat…_

Damn it. Damn it to hell.

_(fade_ )

Major Kalenna had given him the choice. Parvok — who after these long decades of military service no longer even thought of himself by the name his mother had once bestowed upon the treasured little newborn in her arms — reminded himself sternly of that. She had given him the choice, and he'd decided it was better to brave the harsh exposure of the all-but-deserted yard than to tend the dying Cardassian.

Someone had to do it, and someone had to go out with the General in case he was too grievously injured in the ring to get back to the barracks unaided. This was the less awful task, but as Parvok stepped out of the shelter of the doorway to find the Jem'Hadar gathered to witness the bout, he began to lose his resolve.

They terrified him, these silent, glaring sentinels with their craggy grey faces and their flinty eyes and their ever-present plasma weapons. Long familiarity had done nothing to normalize the dread Parvok felt every time he laid eyes on one of the Dominion's soulless soldiers. He looked at them, and saw only death, and he feared them as he had feared nothing else in all his life: not the Tal Shiar, not the Klingons, not the Borg, not even his father.

He didn't understand how the others _didn't_ fear them. Oh, he supposed they did, after a fashion, but they never let that fear rule them, and they certainly didn't let it dissuade them from taking ghastly risks! It was true that Major Kalenna had spent most of her career as that which was feared, and so being ruled by fear herself was a foreign experience. It was a well-known fact that Klingons stalked death with the same determination they stalked their foes; there was nothing surprising about the General's behaviour. And there was no accounting for Tain.

But Parvok had half-hoped, when the human was deposited unconscious in their barracks, that he might at last have found a kindred spirit. Not that their cell had needed another coward… but it was a lonely thing to be the one unremarkable person in a group of relentless heroes, or whatever you wanted to call them. Every time they attempted something bold and reckless — climbing the ore conveyor in search of tools, for instance, or stealing a laser scalpel from the Vorta to get into the wall — Parvok had existed in a state of abject terror, convinced they would be caught and punished, even executed, and him with them. He had looked forward to having one person in the barracks, at least, who was not running headlong towards disaster. It hadn't worked out that way.

The Federation doctor had proved the most recklessly heroic of them all. Parvok still could not believe the things that man had done. Running into the ring when the Jem'Hadar had scarcely called an end to another bloody match, just to offer aid to a fallen prisoner he did not even know. Facing the General at his most ferocious, newly released from isolation. Arguing with Tain as if the Cardassian was not capable of dispatching men soundlessly by night. Deliberately drawing out his battles with the Jem'Hadar, simply to provide a distraction while the old man hacked into the power grid. Defying Deyos during the count, not once or twice but repeatedly, relentlessly, right up until yesterday morning when he had finally gone too far. The human had swiftly made it plain that he was either unspeakably brave, unspeakably stupid, or possessed of a death wish.

The gong sounded as the Jem'Hadar assigned to fight the Klingon slid into a battle-ready stance. The General did the same. Although he had no wish to see the man injured again — not the least because it would mean he'd have to step in to help him — Parvok was relieved that the eyes of the spectating guards riveted instantly on the small arena. The Jem'Hadar did not seem to take pleasure in anything, but they were in their soulless way fascinated by the action in the ring. And the General, of course, was their most anticipated combatant. That was why he alone, of all the prisoners in the camp, was selected regularly every few days. That was why he had amassed hundreds of fights, when most had faced only a dozen. As soon as he began to move, they were transfixed.

And Parvok, at least for the present, could slip into the shadow of the nearest pillar and find refuge once more in his thoughts.

He had resented the Doctor at first. His dauntless courage, his apparent obliviousness both to the consequences of defiance and the true ugly nature of existence. All his life, Parvok had heard stories of Federation idealism, but he had never imagined it to be so indefatigable. He had thought for certain that the beating the Starfleet officer had taken in the ring would have tarnished his optimistic streak a little. Not so.

More surprising still was the way it had come to affect Parvok. He did not consider himself an impressionable man. The long years and a hard life had given him thick callouses of cynicism. Yet he had been swayed by the human's patience and empathy. Parvok had confided things in the Doctor that he had not entrusted to anyone in his decades of military service. That frightened him a little, too: the vulnerability he had allowed himself when he spoke of his art, of his long-suppressed dreams, of his wish for his freedom. Yet he was certain, even though the very idea defied a lifetime of indoctrination and experience, that Bashir would not use it against him. He would not disseminate it to anyone, not even for his own gain or protection. That, too, was so remarkable as to be almost beyond crediting, but Parvok believed it. It was impossible to witness the lengths to which the human would go to protect those around him, and  _not_ believe.

There was a crash of flesh and mail as the General was flung upon his back. His opponent swooped down, fist hammering into the warrior's jaw. The Klingon snarled and tried to grapple with the Jem'Hadar above him, but he was not as strong now as he had been when the survivors of the Tal Shiar fleet — and their Obsidian Order co-conspirators — had been brought to the camp. He rocked awkwardly, trying to get an advantageous grip. Even Parvok, inexpert in hand-to-hand combat, could see the General was favouring his left arm — the one he had dislocated time and again. Doctor Bashir had set it repeatedly, but common sense demanded it was weak from the repeated trauma, and quite likely a source of considerable pain.

Finally, the General managed to hook one of his boots around the Jem'Hadar's ankle, aided by the talon-like spike on the toe. With a sharp jerking motion that had to have been hell on the hip joint the Doctor had been so diligently helping him stretch and strengthen for weeks, the warrior cost the Jem'Hadar his balance, and suddenly they were both on the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder. General Martok rolled away, scrambling to his knees and groping for the nearest pylon to sound the gong before he could be declared in forfeiture of the match. By the time his scaly opponent did the same, he was ready to launch into his next assault.

The Jem'Hadar observing the match made no sound to cheer on their comrade, nor to denigrate their prisoner. They watched in eerie, appraising silence as the General made a series of quick, decisive blows, finishing with a sharp upper cut to the underside of the guard's jaw. Parvok would not have dared that, wary of the row of spines protruding from it. Either Martok did not care if he impaled a knuckle or two, or he had such faith in his aim that he did not believe that possible. Either way, he landed the blow, and the Jem'Hadar went flying. He landed hard, his back bisected by the raised lip of the ring with its small domed lights. The resulting _crunch_ was hideous to hear, and Parvok flinched reflexively.

The guard tried to roll onto his side, but he could not. The Klingon withdrew, still facing his foe, still ready for battle. But the Third — both First and Second were curiously absent — called the match for Martok, and allotted him his five minutes' rest.

That was Parvok's cue to go forward, bottle in hand. Doctor Bashir had accomplished that much at least, or perhaps the Vorta had merely relented before the entire prisoner population began to sicken for want of water. Today, though they had been given the same meagre half-ration of mush, each prisoner had again been issued two bottles. Parvok had drunk greedily of his first one, miserably thirsty after two days of the reduced portion. Only Major Kalenna's glance of wordless reproof had prevented him from draining it right there in the mess area. The relief of that one desperate need had been enough to reawaken in Parvok some hope of a future, a sliver of faith in the mad plan for rescue that all the others seemed to take as preordained.

He stood by the pylon, trying not to tremble visibly even though the Jem'Hadar were all around him with their dead eyes and their deadly hands and still deadlier armaments. Parvok fumbled with the stopper, and the General took the bottle from him, taking a short, sharp swig and nodding curt thanks. They rarely spoke to one another, unless Martok was barking some word of reproof for what he deemed Parvok's cowardice. He did not understand, Klingon that he was, that sometimes it was better to shrink that one might live to breathe another day.

Parvok didn't mind the man's disdain, or tried not to. At least it was generalized, both to his behaviour and to the Klingon perception of what a Romulan was — likely just as deeply ingrained as Romulan perceptions of Klingons. Tain's criticisms were far more incisive, far more terrible: penetrating right to the core of Parvok's deepest doubts and fears and self-disgust. He was even crueller now, laid low, than he had ever been during the endless months when they'd stood the constant, agonizing watch while he laboured on the transmitter. He did not have strength enough to stand unaided, or to totter to the toilet. But he had strength enough to claw at Parvok's soul.

He didn't understand why Major Kalenna insisted on continuing to care for him. Her argument that the rescuers would know no one but Tain or the Doctor was pragmatic. Yet still Parvok wanted to wash his hands of the wretch. He had been still more concerned at mealtime, when Kalenna had produced a second foil pouch after the first one was filled. She had not passed that one around, but scooped most of the rest of her poor portion into it before secreting it away in one broad sleeve. Once in the barracks, she had given Tain one, and placed the other carefully in the cargo case that held the medical supplies.

"In case," she had said simply. When Parvok had shaken his head blankly, she had clarified: "If the Doctor is released, he will be hungry. We must have something to give him."

"And if he's not released?" asked Parvok.

She had shrugged in her cool, patrician way. All these bitter months, and she was still the Tal Shiar operative: calm, commanding, and self-assured. "Then I'll eat what's there, and fill it again. But there _will_ be food for him when they let him out. He is enduring privation for our sakes, and I intend to do what I can to ease that. It may not be much, but it's better than nothing."

_Better than nothing_. Yes, that was probably true. But Parvok still did not know what to make of that. Somewhere along the way, Major Kalenna's policy of distributing resources to maintain the overall integrity of the unit had become coloured with compassion. The Starfleet doctor had had a hand in that as well.

A sharp announcement came from the Third as the Ninth climbed into the ring, limber and ready for battle. The gongs sounded twice, and General Martok hissed in anticipation. The second match began.

_(fade_ )

** Medical and Exobiology Glossary: **

**gastrocnemii:** the long muscle between knee and ankle that forms the bulge of the calf.


	75. Unimaginable

_Note: I'll be catching up on replies later today, I hope. Thank you everyone for your support as I continue to grapple with my health!_

_The incomparable phoenixjaxa has written a beautiful story inspired by “The Viewless Winds”. It is linked below. Please read!_

**Part XIII, Act IV: Unimaginable**

General Martok glowered at the back of his hand as Kalenna blotted the dark blood from his knuckles. Klingon hide was hardy, but he'd split the skin over three of them, and between his second and third fingers there was a deep puncture wound where he had struck one of his opponent's facial horns. The warrior was sitting stiffly, obviously in pain but facing it ferociously rather than fearfully. There had been a time, not so long ago, when he would have rebuffed Kalenna's offer to see to his hand. Then, only the severest of injuries had been sufficient for him to permit such attention.

Doctor Bashir had changed that. Now, Martok was accustomed to being examined — and treated — after each match. He was not pleased to be tended by her instead, and she could not fault him for that, but he was tolerating it. As she blotted again at the puncture wound, Kalenna's sharp eyes caught a glimpse of something pale and glossy before the blood welled up again. Her first uneasy thought was that the wound had exposed the bone. If so, they needed the physician, and there was no more to be said about it. Then she wondered…

With her smallest finger, she scooped into the wound. Kalenna tried to keep her nails neatly pared by biting them short after cleansing in the sanitary unit, but they were still longer than she liked: it was difficult to nibble close enough without nipping the quick. That did, however, mean that her nail was long enough to snag the particle driven into the wound. A low hiss of discomfort and grim endurance passed clenched fangs, but the General did not even attempt to twitch away.

Kalenna withdrew her finger, now slick with blood, and blotted meticulously with a clean corner of the sterile pad. It was the one she'd had to remove from its pouch in order to free up a vessel to fill with the portion of stewed grain now stowed in the cargo box with the medical supplies. Her stomach tightened, miserably empty, and she commanded it to be still. The scant mouthfuls she'd had left over after contributing her share for Tain and laying aside that measure for the Doctor had only been enough to awaken her tormented appetite. Even after the endless months of hunger — coming up more rapidly than she cared to think on two years — it seemed her body still had the capacity to yearn for things it could not have. Yet her mind was honed with a lifetime of Imperial discipline, and she quieted her body's unhappy demands.

Kalenna turned her wrist to show General Martok his trophy: a slender, bone-coloured sliver. "There is a guard today who has a groove in his horn," she said. "How hard did you strike him?"

A glint of triumphal satisfaction ignited in Martok's eye. "Hard enough, it seems," he rumbled. He flexed his fingers as if the pain of the motion awakened the memory of the blow, and the faint shadow of a smirk tugged at his lips — still visibly dry after the days of reduced water rations. Fresh beads of blood rose from the abrasions, and the puncture was filling again.

Kalenna dressed his hand as swiftly and neatly as she was able. She didn't have Doctor Bashir's skill, but she could certainly manage a simple bandage. The General let her work in silence, and when she was finished he nodded his thanks before starting in on the slow, deliberate stretches the Doctor had taught him for his compromised elbow. Kalenna rose then and went to check on Tain.

The Cardassian was sleeping again, or at least he was unconscious. His breathing was slow, uneven, and dreadfully laboured. Kalenna could hear it sawing against the structures at the back of his throat, and his broad chest scarcely seemed to move at all. His species never possessed a healthful viridescence: Cardassians always looked sickly to Kalenna's eyes. Even so, Tain's colour was terrible: not merely grey but waxen, with fish-belly splotches where the deflated jowls hung over his cheekbones. His lips were cracked, a dark scab crusted in one rift, and Kalenna wondered if she ought to wake him so that he could drink.

She decided against it. Better to let the volcano of vitriol slumber while it could.

The Breen sat on their cot, silent and motionless. And watchful. Kalenna did not doubt that they were watchful. She had long been wary of the masked soldier, and not just because of the old proverb: _Never turn your back on a Breen_. Kalenna was accustomed to being able to gauge the thoughts and emotions of those around her by the subtleties of facial expression, voice, and body language. She had varied success from person to person and species to species, but for the most part she was accurate in her determinations. It was part of what had made her such an accomplished operative for the Tal Shiar, and it had helped her to survive in that organization's cutthroat internal hierarchy as well. With the Breen, she had neither expression nor voice to measure, and what body language there was had been very limited until recently.

Like the rest of them, the Breen had responded to Doctor Bashir in unexpected ways. They had seemed to emerge from their shell of silent detachment. Not to try to speak, of course: they had given up that endeavour, and their clanking, mechanized linguistic acrobatics, as soon as it had become apparent that neither Cardassian nor Romulan Universal Translators were any more equipped than Martok's to deal with the Breen language. But they had become involved in the activity in the barracks in ways they never had before: contributing water to the communal supply, fetching Doctor Bashir in from the corridor when he was so disastrously injured after his bouts in the ring, and most recently, standing at Martok's side as if they intended to fight with him in the Doctor's defence. There were untold depths behind the eyeless blank of that helmet, and Kalenna wondered now, as she had not troubled to do in the whole year they had been guarding Tain as he worked on the transmitter, how much the Breen understood of what they had done.

The shriek of the hydraulics inside the wall pierced her sensitive ears, as always, so that she hardly heard the _bang_ as the door flew open. Parvok came in, moving in quick, timid steps that masked his deeper resolve. He was not a man of great courage, but he was a good soldier. He was the sort on whom the Romulan Star Empire was built: tirelessly obedient, doggedly dedicated, and just frightened enough to keep from stepping too far out of line. In the early years of her career, serving as an observer on various warbirds, Kalenna had been contemptuous of such soldiers. She had disdained their lack of ambition and imagination, and what she had perceived as the stagnation of their careers. She knew better now.

There was safety in the constancy of a lifetime in the lower ranks, certainly, but there was also a degree of commitment she was not certain she herself possessed. Could she have made herself content with one position, one roster of duties, one role to fill her years? And consigned to such, could she have still comported herself with dignity and loyalty? She thought not. Yet Parvok had and did — even here, where she knew he lived in daily terror of the Jem'Hadar and the unfamiliar prisoners and Enabran Tain. That was why she had chosen him as her aide, offered him her protection, and why she would die for him if the need arose. There was no more valuable adjutant than one who was willing to face his greatest fears in order to serve. Parvok was, in his own way, an extraordinary man.

"What is it?" Kalenna asked, trying to modulate her voice so that the breathless hope did not colour it. "The Doctor?"

Parvok shook his head tightly, and she felt her heart sink in spite of herself. She knew it was too soon to hope for the Starfleet officer's release, but she had been unable to help it.

"New prisoners," said the Sub-Lieutenant. "Just turned out into the yard."

Kalenna moved away from Tain's cot, stepping carefully around the Breen's armoured knees. "From the Alpha Quadrant?" she asked, pulse quickening a little. The possibilities were innumerable, but news from home — or near home — was still her first thought. The second, far grimmer, was that rescue had come, but been thwarted.

Parvok shook his head. "I do not know the species," he said. "Perhaps you will?"

Kalenna kept her shoulders straight, her head erect. She nodded tightly, and looked back towards the rear bench. "General, are you willing to watch over Tain?" she asked.

Martok grunted in the affirmative, still focused intently on the slow, contemplative motion of his arm. He approached these exercises as he did his martial arts, with discipline and admirable serenity. Klingon spirituality had come to fascinate Kalenna, whose own culture had a more aseptic approach to personal enlightenment.

With the Cardassian's care provided for, she reached for the door panel. Parvok stepped aside to let her pass, but fell into step behind her. She wasn't surprised, and indeed was quite grateful for his presence. He was not the most daunting of bodyguards, but still it gave her confidence to have her subordinate at her side as she strode past the nearest pair of Jem'Hadar and into the open.

Five aliens stood near the far end of the atrium, in a tight but disordered knot. They looked dazed and disoriented, obviously fresh from the search and disarming procedure — and likely, the First's stern speech about the inescapability of Internment Camp 371. They were all of the same species: fine-boned and orange-hued, with hairless, crested skulls crenelated with irregular protrusions. Four were ostensibly male (though of course it was not always possible to be certain with other species). The fifth was smaller, clad in purple instead of burgundy, and possessed of breasts and gently curved hips. She — if _she_ she was — was wringing her long hands. As the others closed ranks, whispering urgently, she wandered a few steps away, looking around with wide, frightened eyes.

Kalenna felt and swiftly suppressed a swell of muddled emotions. For too long now, she had been the only woman in the prison. The last of her female compatriots had died of injuries sustained in the ring two months before General Martok lost his eye. She had felt the loneliness of that more keenly than she cared to admit, and she felt it again now as she looked at the lost-eyed figure before her.

She wasn't the only one watching. Several of the other prisoners, the ones who came out to try to walk off the cold and the boredom, had paused in their pointless orbits to stare. Most were Romulans, the Cardassians too far gone in the misery of orbital night to care… yet. But it was that thought which spurred Kalenna to action.

She crossed the breadth of the atrium in brisk, crisp strides of the sort she'd been taught to take in the halls of the Imperial War College. Subsequent lessons in subterfuge and disguise had involved learning how to lay it aside again in order to take on other guises, because it was the chief line of demarcation between lifelong civilians and those with military experience. There were certainly times, especially here, where it was helpful to affect a more circumspect stance. But not now. She intended to make plain that this new prisoner, this woman, was under the protection of the formidable inmates of Barracks 6, and she had to convey that from the first.

Perhaps she came forward a little too forcefully. The alien startled and looked at Kalenna with soft, pleading eyes. She was not a soldier then, or else she came from a world where even the soldiers could afford to be kind. Kalenna's thoughts flitted briefly to Doctor Bashir and his apparently boundless aquifer of compassion. At this proximity, she could see the fine lines and soft sagging of the alien woman's skin — traits that might be merely characteristic of her species, but on Romulus would be signs of venerable age.

"Greetings," Kalenna said quietly, trying to keep her voice courteous and welcoming even though she could not relax the stance that communicated her authority to the watching Cardassians. "I am Major Kalenna of the Tal Shiar. I am a prisoner here also. I want to help you."

The other woman tilted her head and frowned, then spoke. A series of warbling, almost musical syllables spilled out: clearly purposeful speech, but to Kalenna's ears only nonsense.

"Try again," she coaxed, hoping that one Universal Translator or the other — assuming these aliens possessed them and they had not been incorporated into a confiscated communications device — would catch on to the speech pattern. "If we keep talking, perhaps the algorithms will take effect. I am from a planet in the Alpha Quadrant, on the other side of the Wormhole. The Dominion has designs upon my Empire. They…"

She trailed off, feeling foolish. It was difficult to think of what to say when one knew the other person could not understand. But her mind was stronger than this momentary self-consciousness, and Kalenna gathered her wits.

"There is a doctor in our barracks," she said. "And a Klingon warrior. We can protect you. I wish to help you learn to navigate the… unique culture of the camp. There are people here who may prove a threat to you if they perceive an opportunity. Some of them are watching now."

The alien woman sighed softly, and Kalenna fell silent, hoping her words had been understood. Instead, another string of melodious warbling came from the orange-tinted lips, and one delicate hand rose. The woman's fingertips grazed the front of Kalenna's tunic, where the faint contour of her breast, much reduced by slow starvation, showed beneath the quilted fabric. The next sentence had the unmistakable lilt of a question.

"I am female. A woman," said Kalenna. "Are you? If so, I believe we are the only two, unless perhaps the Breen…"

But it was useless, and as their eyes met they both saw it. There was a susurration of air as some sinus passage closed, and a mournful tone like that of a woodwind instrument emitted from the cranial crevices in the woman's crested skull. The two nearest pairs of Jem'Hadar stiffened, training their weapons towards them, and the four other newcomers, the ones Kalenna thought were male, converged rapidly.

The woman shook her head hurriedly as she turned to them, speaking in low, rapid tones. Their defensive tension relaxed a little, but the looks they cast Kalenna were still mistrustful. One of them placed a plaintive hand on the woman's shoulder, uttering an unmistakable plea. Her mouth tightened, but she nodded. Strange how many cultures on how many countless worlds espoused those two simple gestures, Kalenna thought: left-and-right in the negative, up-and-down in the affirmative.

They began to move off, but as she took her first step the woman turned back. She touched Kalenna's sleeve with another little thrum of her cranial passages, this one unmistakably regretful. The four syllables she uttered were, too. Then she shuffled off to join the males, who closed in around her in obvious relief.

Kalenna watched them go, trying not to feel as if she had lost something. She did not need feminine company, she told herself. Her days in this place were numbered. Soon enough, she would be back on the other side of that Wormhole, bound for Romulus. Bound for home, for the handsome little house on the quiet street, where Livrana waited and Kalen played. Where she could forget these bitter months of privation and misery and loneliness, emptiness in this bleak world of desperation and maleness. Where she could reclaim her true life.

Soon enough.

 _(fade_ )

Time was meaningless. When the curfew announcement sounded, so muffled and distant that the voice of the Jem'Hadar barking the order was only a formless honk, it took Julian utterly by surprise. Another day gone? Well, not for him, he supposed. His days in this pit were measured from the count, not curfew, weren't they? He thought so. He seemed to remember being pulled away during the count. At the beginning of the count, when he'd stepped forward to interrupt Deyos in the hope not only of dissuading him of his wholesale cruelty, but of distracting him from the petty vengeance of his daily game. Yes, that was it, wasn't it? From the Vorta's words, Julian could not hope that he'd succeeded in persuading him to restore the rations, but at least he must have spared his fellow prisoners from one long and agonizing count.

His ribs ached from shivering, although it seemed he was learning to sleep through all but the worst of the paroxysms. Julian spread his long hands, numb and aching with the chill, and massaged his sides for a little while, until the effort grew exhausting. It was startling how wearying the slightest exertion was, even though his clinical mind knew that made sense. It wasn't just the fact that he'd been fasting while his metabolism thrummed on at its usual accelerated pace, burning more energy than ever in an attempt to keep him warm. Nor was it the strain of dehydration on cells desperate to maintain their tricarboxylic acid cycles and other vital processes fundamentally dependant on water. There was something more pernicious at play.

He was suffering from the slow psychological poison of sensory deprivation. The darkness, the near-silence, the lack of variation to the sensations he felt on his bare skin: all of that was clawing at his sanity, eating away at his sense of self. His peripatetic attempts to occupy his mind, disjointed and disordered though they were, helped a little — but they could not overcome the instinctual need for external stimulation. He needed sounds, lights, textures, voices: not this hollow little void filled with nothing but cold and silence and the faint tickle of air from the ventilation grate.

 _You can endure this, Julian. You're stronger than this._ It was a voice, all right; not in his ears, where he needed it most, but at least clear and crystalline in his mind. Jadzia, calm and reassuring. Uplifting, as she always was. In the Lethean's labyrinth, she'd been the personification of his recklessness and impulsivity. Here, he could tell simply from the tone his mind lent to her that this was not the case at all.

_You're stronger than this. You'll survive. Sit up a little. Try to relax your shoulders. Think of what you've been through in this place. The struggles for your patients, the clashes with the Vorta, your injuries in the ring. If you can survive all of that, you can survive this._

The voice of his inner affirmation, that's what she was. The voice of his confidence, which was too easily shaken and too often forgotten these days. Julian sometimes remembered, rather wistfully, when his cockiness had seemed like more than just a frantic act; when it had felt natural, even earned. He knew that had made him rather insufferable to be around — it was the reason he'd made so few friends at the Academy, and the reason he'd rubbed Miles the wrong way right from the off. A few hard knocks and horrible setbacks were all it had taken for the dark undercurrent of insecurity to overswell its banks and damp down that arrogance.

The professional failures had been the worst. Goran'agar's men, slaves to the last to their addiction to Ketracel White so that it cost them their lives, and their visionary leader his own — all because he, Julian Bashir, had failed to break the Dominion's stranglehold upon its soldiers. And the people of the ruined world of Tepla, so trusting, so hopeful… so _grateful_ , even though all he'd been able to offer in the end was a cure for the next generation, not the ones who were dying now. That was a common thread that ran through all of Julian's research projects now: not only his ongoing experimentation with nuceotide base pair reshuffling on the Blight virus itself, but his prion replication projects and his vast Bajoran immunology study. He was always on the lookout for something, anything, that might shine a light on that problem, or open a channel to a cure.

Sometimes he dreamed in strands of RNA spun together to form web-like purple lesions like those that had spread across Ekoria's sweet, trusting face.

He could almost hear it now, the bare metal-on-metal creak of the axle pin as the charnel-wagon came to bear her young, lifeless body away. It set his teeth on edge, and Julian knew his shoulders were creeping up towards his ears again in defiance of what the gentle Jadzia-like voice was trying to coax him to do, but…

But the sound wasn't in his head. It was in his ears, and it wasn't a rusty, hand-forged axle pin, but a smoothly fitted tritanium edge fitted into a groove. It echoed in the small, bare space, and it took Julian a moment to track the refractions to figure out where the sound originated, but then he was scrambling forward onto his knees, groping for the wall to the right of the door. The little hatch, slightly more than halfway up, was open!

His fingers found it, curled around the lip of it, and fumbled inside. He forced himself to slow down, not wanting to risk knocking over whatever was within. Something in the back of his mind was warning him to be careful, warning with a certainty Julian had long ago learned to trust. When his fingertips found the edge of the bowl, he knew why.

On the night Ikat'ika had brought him to the kitchen, he had seen Arat'zuma fill such a vessel: deeper than the dishes used for the prisoners' food rations, and intended to hold water. Julian's heart leapt with hope and he carefully crept his index finger over the lip and into the cold, glassy wetness within.

His hands began to tremble and his knees went weak. The tissues of his mouth and throat burned, and the headache that had been his constant companion for longer than he could even attempt to measure accurately at this point flared in throbbing misery. Julian forced himself to withdraw from the hatch and turn into the corner while he fought for self-control. He couldn't afford to spill so much as a drop, and if he tried to pick up the bowl now, like this, that was exactly what would happen.

Belatedly the fear came to him that the hatch might close again, and so he reached up and put his hand in the gap. He knew if it did close, and with only a fraction of the force with which the barracks doors did, his fingers would be crushed. His surgeon's instinct to protect his hands told him to pull back, but at that moment Julian was overwhelmed by a more primal need: to protect his water source. He forced himself to be still, compelled himself to breathe, and exerted what little control he still could, given his weakened state, over his autonomic functions.

When he felt he was able, he got back onto his knees, and picked up the bowl. His hands still quaked a little, deep in the bone. With determination borne of thousands of hours of surgical experience, Julian commanded them to be still. He eased back onto his heels and brought the dish slowly, very slowly, to his cracked lips. The water stung in the fissures, lapped over his teeth, and struck his tongue.

Relief. Bliss. Paradise. Julian took a long, deep swallow, and felt it fill his mouth, wash over his tonsils, flood down his throat. It almost seemed to sear down his esophagus, cold and unfamiliar, before settling in his stomach. He was about to take another greedy gulp when he heard a new voice.

_Julian, don't._

Deep, measured, steady. And with that unique cadence on his name: _Joolyan_. Captain Sisko.

 _You can't drink too quickly. You'll make yourself sick. And you need to ration that supply: no telling how long it has to last_ , the Captain's voice said serenely, but with genuine empathy. That much at least Altovar had gotten right: then, as now, Benjamin Sisko embodied Julian's sense of professionalism, not only as a doctor but as a Starfleet officer.

When he had arrived at the Academy campus in San Francisco as a teenager, equal parts arrogance and insecurity, Julian had been filled with dreams. A lot of them had been built on the legacies and legends of the great captains of Starfleet history: Archer and Hernandez, April, Pike, Alexander, Spock, Garrett. He had imagined, as he supposed most cadets did, serving beneath an inspiring commanding officer of his own. And he'd been cautioned, as all cadets were, that commanding officers were fallible, imperfect, and certainly not above the stumbles and errors to which everyone at times fell prey. By the time he'd accepted his commission almost a decade later, Julian had studied under and served with enough senior officers to have a more realistic view of those who wore the crimson uniform and the four coveted pips on the collar.

But Captain Sisko was special. He wasn't without his flaws, and there had been times when Julian had been aggravated by his decisions or by the uncomfortable situations he'd put his (admittedly brash) young CMO in. Still he was without question one of the most dedicated and determined officers Julian had ever served with. He had risen to the challenge of a post that had turned out, very rapidly indeed, to be _far_ more challenging than first expected. He grappled on an almost daily basis with the kind of delicate diplomatic and political situations that few starship captains faced — except perhaps on some of the most prestigious flag-bearing vessels. And, increasingly in the last two years especially, Captain Sisko's decisions had carried repercussions for the entire Federation, and even the broader Alpha Quadrant. That was a heavy burden to bear, and he carried it with grace and patience. Julian admired him enormously for that.

He trusted his captain. And he trusted the part of his mind that spoke with his voice. He _did_ have to ration this water, and he _couldn't_ drink too quickly. But neither could he quite bear to lay it aside now. He spread his fingers carefully, trying to get a better sense of the size of the dish, its weight, its probable volume. How much did he have? About a litre, he thought. More or less what he could have expected to receive if he'd been out in the barracks, now that the ration had been cut. Half a normal ration, and even that was less than he needed, but so very much better than nothing.

 _Just another mouthful_?he wheedled, aware he was pleading with himself and that this was faintly ridiculous, but somehow unable to stop it.

 _Yes, another mouthful. But slowly_ , Sisko said. _You're doing well, Julian —_ and again, in his mind it had that melody that was the Captain's alone. _You're doing what you have to do to get back to us. Rescue is coming. Help is on the way. You only need to hold out until it gets here._

"Aye, sir," Julian whispered. His voice was harsh and desiccated in his ears, painful in his raw throat. Speaking was pointless anyway: Sisko wasn't really here, couldn't actually hear him, didn't need his acknowledgement. It felt good to say the words anyhow. It seemed to make his resolve more real.

He took his mouthful of water. He savoured it, moving it around his mouth with his tongue, moistening the buccal tissues, his inflamed and ulcerated gums, the sandpaper expanse of his palate. He swallowed slowly, in tiny trickles. He made it last.

Julian couldn't believe how he'd taken water for granted before, back in his old life aboard Deep Space Nine. Casually ordering a glassful from a replicator whenever he wanted one, without a thought to the quantity. Gulping it down if he felt like it, or abandoning it half-drunk on his desk. Now, he shuffled on his knees to the corner to the left of the door — the one farthest from the stinking hole that was his toilet — and gently set his bowl on the floor. He didn't think he had spilled, but he felt around the dish just to be certain. Then he retreated to the other corner and angled his legs so that if he stretched them thoughtlessly, he wouldn't kick the bowl. He could only hope that if he fell asleep, he didn't change position too drastically.

Rescue was coming. Help was on the way. He only needed to hold out until it got here. He hugged his ribs again, trying to think warm thoughts, and nodded to himself in the blackness. He could hold onto that, couldn't he? The message had been sent. It was only a matter of time.

 _That's not necessarily a good thing, though, is it, Doctor?_ The voice was rueful and cynical, and for a moment Julian thought it was Garak. But Garak never had that regretful, almost jolly tone; that tone that said there was nothing you could do about the world's woes, so why not have fun in the meantime?

 _Quark?_ Julian asked, though he didn't really need the answer.

 _Who else_? asked the bartender, and Julian could almost hear the musical whirl of the dabo wheel. He could certainly smell the mouthwatering melange of fresh hasperat and fruit-based cocktails and slow-roasted lokar beans. His stomach clenched in aching memory, but his mind continued relentlessly on a still crueller course.

 _Think about it, Doctor. You're a practical man, aren't you? An officer, a tactician. You're separated from the others, shut up in here. You don't know what this cargo canister's made of, or how this part of the dome is shielded. You don't know if they'll be able to detect your lifesigns from orbit, or beam you out. Do you think they'll be able to_ break _you out, with the Jem'Hadar between?_

He thought he could see Quark's toothy grin, the crooked, sharpened little spikes crossed at odd angles as the padded shoulders of his colourful jacket shrugged. _If rescue comes and you're still in isolation, what if they can't get you out at all? What if they have to make the strategic decision to leave you behind?_

"No," Julian croaked. Unlike his affirmation to the Captain Sisko voice, this didn't feel good. It tore from his throat like a piece of his soul, a sharp pain at the base of his tongue. He shut his mouth — far easier now, after even that small measure of water — and thought back at Quark, at himself, savagely, _They wouldn't do that! They wouldn't leave me behind! Starfleet wouldn't_ do _that_.

 _But I would_ , said Garak silkily. _You know I would, if I had to. If it was a choice between getting away at all, and trying to rescue one person. And I think you know that there are Starfleet officers who'd feel the same. You can't be sure who I'll be able to persuade to come with me, either, Doctor, can you? Just what_ did _Tain put into that message that will help persuade them?_

Julian's stomach wrenched, this time with dread instead of hunger. Why had he never thought to ask that question? Had Tain put in any word of the imposter? Why hadn't he thought to have the Cardassian include one of his Starfleet identity codes, or his service number? What if Garak _did_ have difficulty persuading anyone to help him? Not for the first time, it occurred to Julian that in the ordinary way of things _he_ was the one that the tailor would turn to if he needed a runabout. With the Changeling exposed and his friend believed dead, who would the Cardassian turn to instead?

If he had to hire mercenaries… if he had to draw upon old connections… if he turned up with a team of reluctant officers believing they were on a wild goose chase… in any of those circumstances, would they be inclined to fight to the last to rescue one prisoner separated from the others? And even in a best-case scenario, with the _Defiant_ in orbit and Captain Sisko and Jadzia and Major Kira to fight for rescue, Julian knew: they still might have to leave him behind. If it was a choice between saving everyone else, and risking all those lives for one man, they might have to leave him behind.

Terror he'd never quite imagined himself capable of feeling tore through him. It tied his lungs in knots and unwound his bowels and made his eyes pulse with the first tentacles of panic. Julian drew up his knees, clutching them, hugging them to his chest as tightly as he could, rocking against them and fighting the urge to give in to the horror of that possibility. Left behind. Left behind, not only to languish here, but to face the wrath of Deyos in the wake of what would be, if the boasts of the First and the Vorta were true, an unprecedented escape. It was unbearable. Unthinkable. Unimaginable.

So why couldn't he stop imagining it?

(f _ade)_

**Medical and Exobiology Glossary**

**Tricarboxylic acid cycle:** also called the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle, a vital metabolic process used by aerobic organisms to release stored energy.


	76. Volley'd and Thunder'd

_Note: An on-the-fly update because I love you all, and it's been too long! Still woefully behind on correspondence; thank you everyone for your understanding!_

_Chapter title from "The Charge of the Light Brigade", (c) 1854, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Inveterate Niners may remember it from Ep. 6.06, "Sacrifice of Angels"._

**Part XIII, Act V: Volley'd and Thunder'd**

The bowl of water became the anchor for Julian's focus. He didn't want to think of it as the anchor for his sanity, because that might mean his hold was more tenuous than he already feared. But it gave structure to the formless blank of empty time that had heretofore only been marked by the distant sound of the prison klaxon. Julian didn't have a faultless internal chrononmeter: even back on Deep Space Nine, he couldn't keep track of time while he slept, and often lost himself in fascinating research conundrums or a busy day of patient care, only to find that hours had slipped by unmarked. On the other extreme, when bereft of stimuli and engagement — when _bored_ — he forgot to even try to keep track. He'd lost count of the hours he and Captain Sisko had waited on the rocky little island in the midst of the Great Link while Odo received his people's cruel judgement. He'd been rather embarrassed by that at the time, though admittedly not half so embarrassed as he'd been a few moments later when Sisko had caught him just on the cusp of skipping a stone across the vast ocean of Founders. But it had also been comforting, as such moments of simple fallibility often were, especially when witnessed: natural human beings, after all, lost track of the time, too.

But it was far worse here. Julian couldn't even sustain a count of his own pulse for more than sixty or seventy beats. That probably meant two minutes, maybe two and a half, but he couldn't be sure. His baseline stress level was higher than the situation objectively warranted; it was very possible that his pulse was elevated enough to throw off his estimates, but not elevated enough for him to be certain of the change. And in any case, he kept losing count — just as bewildering, disorienting, and alarming in here as it had been on the day he'd knelt before Deyos struggling repeatedly to count to two hundred three, only to be smacked down repeatedly until his brain began to go numb. It was better to give up the effort than to face that awful sense of loss when he inevitably failed.

So he fixed his attention on the water, and on the rules surrounding when he could drink from the dish and how much he could have when he did. If he slept — real sleep, not the vacant semiconscious drifting where he could still feel the serpents of chilled air slithering over his naked skin or the itching imprint of the textured floor against his heels and buttocks and the base of his thighs — he could have two swallows, ten millilitres each, a careful count of fifty apart. He could usually count to fifty without losing track, and if he did? Well, then it was all the longer between mouthfuls, and that was good, wasn't it?

When he completed a round of slow, restrictive, unsatisfying stretches to keep his body limber and to warm himself a little, he could have a sip for that. A smaller sip, his mouth's tormented estimation of five millilitres — what Captain Sisko would have described as a teaspoonful, with the quaint imprecision of culinary measurements that both perplexed and fascinated Julian. He rewarded himself similarly if he managed to fight off another wave of panic or yank himself away from the black hole of terror swirling somewhere behind his floating ribs: the dread of being left behind.

Julian knew it was unwise to treat this ration as if it would be reissued at the same time the following day. He had no guarantee of that, none whatsoever. But he was too desperately dehydrated to deny himself water when it was at hand. The best he could do was execute this slow, careful replenishment regimen and hope that he would be given more in due time. A litre wasn't nearly enough, but it would do him more good in his body than it could sitting in a dish in the corner of his cell.

He was already feeling the benefits. His mouth was still dry but no longer sticky, his lips still cracked but no longer burning. The pernicious little cramps that had been rippling through his muscles were gone now, leaving only the ache of cold and long immobility on the hard metal floor. His thoughts were more orderly, his anxiety less acute, and his chest no longer so tight with misery and apprehension. When he sank into shallow slumber again, he did so with greater ease than he had done at any time since being shut up in isolation.

( _fade_ )

A subtle shudder rippled through the deckplates as the _Defiant's_ nose made contact with the airlock. The sophisticated inertial dampers that made it possible for the overpowered little ship to travel at high warp without tearing itself apart masked the movement from all but experienced hands. Jadzia sat back in the helmsman's chair, her work done. From her station at the far side of the bridge, Major Kira announced, "Docking clamps engaged."

Tension ebbed from every body on the bridge, as it always did at this moment of a perilous mission. Realistically, once they were back through the Wormhole they were out of danger — back on the home field, Captain Sisko called it. They were less likely to be followed, and reinforcements were at hand if they were needed; in the form of the station's formidable defences, if nothing else. Yet it didn't really feel like refuge, like safety, until they were docked. Doubly so now, when that shudder and those words meant only one thing to Julian: _home at last, home!_

The Captain was giving his customary post-docking instructions to the department heads, but Julian didn't really listen. He wasn't on duty, and was unlikely to have much expected of him for the next few days at least. Certainly he wouldn't be involved in recalibrating the torpedo guidance systems or repairing the ablative armour or restoring the shields to full capacity. They'd had to fight their way out, and the _Defiant_ had taken some hard knocks in the process, but that didn't matter now.

_Home. Home at last. HOME!_

"Julian?"

Miles was standing over him, hand outstretched. Julian couldn't remember how he'd come to be sitting in his customary place at the station that housed the primary environmental controls and the secondary communications interface. It didn't matter. The contoured chair was the most exquisitely comfortable thing he'd sat on in what felt like half a lifetime, and his body had sagged into it with almost sensual familiarity. He couldn't quite imagine leaving it now, not even to disembark for Deep Space Nine. But Miles had a hand outstretched.

"C'mon," he said, trying to put a gruffly bracing edge on an unwontedly gentle tone. "Let's get you home."

 _Home_!

Julian laid his hand in his friend's, taking a moment to marvel at it. The skin over his knuckles was smooth, not chapped and cracked from the cold and the mercilessly dry air of the prison. His nails were neatly pared by a laser trimmer, instead of bitten raggedly down out of desperation. The crescents of grime he'd become used to seeing beneath them, a result of infrequent sanitization and the fact that the rest of his body was coated in a thin layer of oils and dead skin cells, were gone. His eyes travelled to the crisp, clean cuff of his jumpsuit, and he spread his other hand over his breastbone to confirm it: he was wearing a fresh uniform.

It was almost disappointing. He'd fantasized about his first shower, sonic or otherwise, and about the pleasure of putting on clean clothes again. Now he couldn't remember doing either.

"C'mon, Julian," Miles said again, obligatory annoyance on his lips but kind concern in his eyes. "You don't want to take root there, do you?"

He didn't. He wanted to go home. The station. His own quarters. Secure, familiar surroundings, everything he had pined for in his weeks of captivity. Julian closed his fingers on Miles's hand and let his friend help him to his feet. It took less effort than he would have thought, and he didn't feel the wave of dizziness he had expected. It seemed he'd forgotten his first meal as a free man, too?

They were stepping out of the cross-bridge onto the Promenade now, and he wondered how concerned he ought to be by these lapses in memory: no recollection, now, of the _Defiant's_ hatch or the Docking Ring or the turbolift. Only lifting a gleaming, polished boot over the lip and down onto the step, and planting the other on the carpeted thoroughfare. Bright lights and cheerful banners, the clamour of happy voices transacting daily business, all the sights and sounds and scents of home. _Home, home at last!_

"Just like you remember it?" asked Miles, and although Julian couldn't find his voice, his friend seemed satisfied with his wonder-stricken nod. The Chief clapped his shoulder affectionately. "Hasn't been the same without you!"

It seemed to Julian that they'd left Captain Sisko behind, finishing up the docking checklist and offering words of praise and encouragement to the crew who had executed such a dangerous rescue mission. Yet as he and Miles stepped past the information terminal towards the Infirmary with its bright blue caduceus glowing in radiant welcome, there he was: standing with his arms crossed in front of the turbolift door.

"Doctor, would you join me, please?" he said, his deep voice grave and measured.

Something about that tone made Julian's heartbeat stutter, but Miles was still smiling. He shrugged, too. "Go on," he said. "You knew Starfleet Command would want a debriefing right away."

It seemed an odd thing for Miles to say: more like something from Julian's own mind than his friend's. But it did make sense, and the Captain was waiting. Julian nodded. "Yes, sir," he said, and a moment later they were stepping into the turbolift together, Sisko calling for Ops.

"Captain?" Julian said, unable to understand how he'd failed to ask this before now but equally certain he didn't know the answer. "How did you know he wasn't me?"

He was dying to know, not only how but who. Miles, who shared more of his leisure hours than any other person in Julian's life ever had? Or maybe Jadzia, accustomed to the kind of deeply personal conversations and confidences that would be difficult to counterfeit even for a Changeling equipped with detailed dossiers and Odo's memories of him as of his final encounter with the Great Link? It was equally possible that Nurse Jabara or another of the conscientious caregivers he had worked with daily for years had noticed the coldness and detached calculation that seemed as integral to the Dominion's approach to biomedical science as compassion and sensitivity were to Julian's. Or perhaps one of his patients had noticed: Major Kira, with whom he'd developed a special rapport over the course of her unorthodox pregnancy; or Odo himself, who had needed a lot of patient and circumspect guidance during the adjustment to his new body. Julian wouldn't be surprised to learn the first whisper of discomfort had come from Keiko O'Brien, either: she was insightful and observant, she had keen instincts, and she, too, was a good friend.

Now that the moment was finally here, Julian found that he was anxious, almost desperate, to know what the tip-off had been. What was it about him that was so particular, so unique and irreplicable, that it had proved the impostor's undoing? As Captain Sisko's silence dragged on, Julian felt the slow uncoiling of old insecurities and the anxieties he'd learned to bury over the years under layers of cheerful chatter, personal bravado, and professional confidence. Just what about him _was_ special enough to be worthy of note? Just who in his life cared enough to note it? Was he truly still human enough to have both the uniqueness and the closeness of others? Or had the changes to his genome, his neural pathways, his blood and his body and his mind and his very nature, clipped away too many pieces of his soul along with the learning disabilities and the communication deficits and the failure to thrive?

And as he always did when his chest began to grow tight with anxiety about himself and his nature — or unnaturalness — and there was no other ready distraction, Julian began to run off at the mouth.

"I knew you'd work it out, of course," he said quickly, glancing sideways at his captain, who was staring steadily at the rippling lights of the lift. Was he trying to avoid eye contact? Surely not… "There were times when I worried, because you know: General Martok's replacement was active for a year and a half before the truth came out, and in the end it took Odo's intelligence from the Link and his investigative instincts to expose the Founder. But after all, Deep Space Nine doesn't function like a Klingon warship, and I'm not nearly as set apart as one of their Generals, am I? I mean, my patients, my staff, the rest of the crew, the whole community—"

He took a pause, as much to catch his breath as to give Sisko a chance to say something. The Captain glanced at him, but did not speak. Julian tried to hold his tongue a little longer, but he couldn't help himself.

"And it only makes sense that you'd be vigilant," he said, the words tripping over one another in their haste to get out. "After what happened when Ambassador Krajensky was taken, when the Changeling on the _Defiant_ impersonated me so that he could evade the blood screenings and frame Eddington. They replaced me once before, after all; why wouldn't you suspect they'd do it ag—"

Sisko's head pivoted sharply, dark eyes stern, and Julian stammered into silence, ashamed of his lack of tact. Lieutenant Commander Eddington's defection to the Maquis and his use of Captain Yates's atruistic heart to manipulate her romantic partner was understandably a sore point for the Captain. He wouldn't want to be reminded of the man, even so long after their last encounter.

An apology was trying to work its way up past the lump of social awkwardness in Julian's throat when the first strip of open air appeared at the top of the turbolift and they rose into Ops. They were not even level with the floor when Sisko grabbed hold of the rail and launched up onto the deck with a long, purposeful stride. Julian scrambled after him, caving to the ineluctable urge to fill the silence again.

"And we're such a close-knit crew, sir," he said. "It's inevitable, isn't it, that we'd notice a change like that if given enough time: one of our number, replaced by the enemy."

Ops was busy at this hour, whatever _this hour_ was: Julian saw familiar faces at every side. Ensign Garrett, one of his most capable medical technicians who also picked up the odd duty shift under Lieutenant Commander Dax, was sitting at the life support station. Jadzia herself was at Astrometrics, although he could have sworn she'd been left behind on the _Defiant_. There was Major Kira at the central table, too: clearly either they'd beamed up here or he'd lost time. But then the bowed figure at work in the pit, halfway into one of the access panels, withdrew and straightened, crossing his arms on the lip of the floor as he looked up. It was Miles, whom Julian was _certain_ they'd left on the Promenade not five minutes ago. Even if he'd called for the transporter, he wouldn't have had enough time to dig out his tools, roll up his sleeves, and bury himself in the wall like that.

Lost time, missing memories, people shifting around arbitrarily to appear where he expected to see them. This was a dream.

Julian's heart sank, even as he followed Captain Sisko around the perimeter of the upper tier of the station's control centre. He wasn't here, this wasn't real. He was in Internment Camp 371, a prisoner of the Dominion languishing in a tiny, barren isolation cell with nothing but his uniform trunks, a small dish of water, the smell of his own excrement, and the contents of his disordered mind for company.

He should wake up; he knew it. As he passed Corporal Vaeda, busy at the Communications station, and Worf at his customary place across the stairs from Jadzia, Julian _knew_ he shouldn't indulge this fantasy. But he couldn't bear to break it. One hand slid along the railing to take a tight turn while the other drifted up to the front of his clean, crisp, whole uniform. He wasn't filthy, here. He wasn't freezing. He wasn't starving. Everyone was watching him but Sisko, and for some reason none of them — not even Miles or Jadzia — were smiling, but he wasn't alone. There was light. Fresh air. The hundred familiar background sounds and scents and sensations of home.

_Home. Home. God, I want to be home…_

He wanted it so much that he could hardly breathe for the ache in his chest, and he almost let out a whimper of misery before catching himself. Dreams were fragile. If he let on to these staring constructs of his imagination that he knew that's what they were, Julian thought that might be enough to wake him. He didn't want that. If he just played along as if this were real, perhaps he could cling to this refuge of the mind a little longer. He dreaded waking to what awaited him. He wasn't sure he could bear it.

So he followed Captain Sisko through the double doors with their fans of ironwork, into the kidney-shaped office. Sisko strode right past the broad desk to the window, staring out at the stars as the doors slid closed behind Julian, shutting them off from Ops and the plethora of watchful eyes.

"Where would you like me to start, sir?" Julian asked, trying to keep up the pretext of the dream. "Do you have specific questions, or would you like me to try to make an extemporaneous report, or prioritize the…"

Sisko turned on him, and the stoic impassivity was gone from his face. Now, it was contorted in anger, disgust, and utmost loathing. Julian took a step back from those blazing eyes, heart hammering horribly in his chest. His jaw fell loose and his own eyes grew wide, but he couldn't look away.

"C-Captain?" he stammered, lapsing into another nervous habit he'd fought to get the best of in recent years. "I…"

" _Explain yourself_ ," Sisko spat, the words rumbling in his throat. Julian floundered, utterly at a loss, and the Captain's lip curled contemptuously. "I spoke to Tain, _Doctor_ ," he sneered. "I know everything."

 _You don't! You can't!_ Julian's mind protested frantically. Even Tain didn't know everything, surely? But the look on his captain's face, the hatred and abbhorence in his eyes…

"You're unnatural," snarled Sisko, striding closer like a prowling predator. He was only a few centimetres taller than Julian, but his breadth and the vast scope of his rage and his righteous repulsion made him loom like a seething Sheliak. "You're a freak. A monster. You're an _Augment!"_

Julian's mouth was a desolate, desiccated rockscape blasted suddenly with the hot wind of horror that broke from his lungs. His lips moved, but no sound emerged. For seventeen years he had dreaded this, imagined it, dreamt of it — but it had never been this hateful, this horrendous. His captain, his role model, the paragon of all that it was to be a Starfleet officer, looking at him with such twisted, odious hatred… and that awful, scathing word that branded him with the legacy of countless atrocities.

"You lied! You cheated! You have no right to be here, no right to wear that uniform!" Sisko bellowed.

Julian had been dressed down by his captain before, deservedly so. It was an uncomfortable position to be in, lonely even when you weren't the only officer singled out for a scolding. But it had never been like this. Captain Sisko had perfected the art of making a person feel thoroughly ashamed of their actions or poor judgement without feeling ashamed of _themselves_ : of tearing into problematic behaviour without ever attacking the transgressor's core identity. This was different. This was every doubt and fear and insecurity he'd ever experienced, amplified a thousandfold in Benjamin Sisko's wrathful voice.

"You're a disgrace to Starfleet! A blight upon the practice of medicine! You're an abomination, an affront to humanity!" Sisko roared. Then his voice dropped at once into the swift and savage whisper Julian had heard him unleash only in extremes of rage and under the highest of stakes. "I don't know how you got away with it for all these years, Mister, but the game is over. Starfleet Command is going to throw the book at you, _assuming there's anything left once I'm through!"_

Julian stared at his commanding officer, petrified in the face of such vitriol where once there had been trust and mutual esteem. He tried to speak — whether to defend himself or to plead his case or to beg for leniency he was not certain — but it was useless. His abundant gift of gab had abandoned him, even while his mind was teeming with protestations that this couldn't be true, couldn't be real, couldn't be Sisko, not his Captain Sisko, tearing into him with poison-tipped fangs of hatred.

 _It's not_ , a part of him, buried and terrified, protested. It sounded far more like a frightened child than a Starfleet officer. A lonely little boy, trying to talk himself out of a hell of his own making. _It's not your Captain Sisko. It's a dream, remember? Miles in the pit: it's a dream._

Not a dream, not anymore. It was a nightmare.

Julian groped for his sympathetic nervous system, trying at the same time to activate an alpha-adrenergic response in his peripheral vessels. If he could elevate his heart rate and blood pressure, speed up his respiratory drive, he'd wake himself up gasping. It was his own biological ejector mechanism, grounded in his understanding of physiology and the unique ( _unnatural!_ ) degree of control over his autonomic functions that was one more thing he'd grown up taking for granted.

"I don't think so, _Doctor_!" The nightmare-Sisko flung the treasured honorific at him with a degree of repugnant mockery to which Deyos could only aspire. He made it sound like the vilest of epithets: he might as well have spat that hateful, antiquated word again…

"You're not escaping that easily," Sisko hissed, slinking nearer still. Now Julian could feel the hot breath on his face. They were close enough that the Captain could embrace him without straining to reach — or, more likely, strangle him. In dreams, distance was as mutable as time, and yet he couldn't seem to force this apparition away.

"That's cheating. Real humans can't do that, and you know it! You're a freak. You're a fraud. You're nothing but a counterfeit of a person, and I won't let you take the easy way. Not this time!"

It was still Sisko speaking, but his voice was changing. The timbre grew higher, coarser, less musical. The accent shifted: no longer the Captain's clear American diction, but the lively Thames Estuary variant from which Julian had tried so hard to distance himself in adolescence — not as a repudiation of the culture, but of the man. It wasn't the words that triggered this: God knew no conman ever admitted his construct was a fraud. But the sentiment, the need to make him feel small, was all too familiar to Julian.

His father's voice followed him as he turned heel and tried to run.

"Look at you, you're pathetic! One little challenge to your nature and you forget that clever gob of yours? Can't even wake yourself up from a bad dream? What's the point of having all these talents, if they can't even keep you out of prison? I told you Starfleet was a waste of your talents, and look where it's got you! The truth's out now, and they're going to destroy you."

 _You!_ You _destroyed me! You did this to me!_ Julian's heart wailed the words as he bolted for the door, but he was still mute. That was characteristic of nightmares, too — not just his, but human nightmares in general. A collective dread of the inability to communicate?

His legs, at least, were working, and so were the doors, though they were much too far away. He seemed to run thirty metres instead of two, before he reached the proximity sensor and the panels slid apart. The hybrid of Benjamin Sisko and Richard Bashir was right on his heels, the ungodly melding of the two most significant authority figures in his life. That one was a source of admiration and emulation, the other a stupendous monument to What Not To Do didn't matter at all in this moment. They were both pursing him with the same intent: unmitigated destruction of all he had built, all he had valued, everything he loved.

And as the door slid open, Julian thought he saw an ally! Jadzia was standing there, feet solidly planted, shoulders squared, arms taut with battle-ready tension. She'd defend him. She'd help him. She'd…

"Liar!" she snapped, bright eyes blazing. "Perjurer! Traitor! Genetic engineering is obscene. How _dare_ you—"

He didn't let her finish. He couldn't. Stomach wrenching with the kind of nausea that should have been impossible to feel after almost four days without food, Julian sidestepped to the right and bolted back into the Captain's office. He felt someone snatching at his sleeve, heard the fabric tear, thought fleetingly of kneeling over Amcet in the ring, of bargaining with Ikat'ika for medical supplies to save the young Cardassian's life… but his focus was the side door, the one designed to allow the Prefect of Terok Nor to slip in and out unnoticed.

He feared that it would be locked, this path of escape closed off to him. But it opened…

And there was Miles.

"I brought you into my home! I let you play with my _daughter_!" he cried, disgust and dismay contorting his broad, earnest face. "Molly's just a little girl: she shouldn't have to be exposed to creatures like you! She's a child!"

 _You don't understand,_ Julian pleaded in thoughts that couldn't form words. _I had no choice. I was a child, too! I was six. I was only six…_

But the dream-O'Brien was advancing, and the others were closing in. Julian took the one route open to him: behind the desk, his hip barking against Sisko's chair. He could hear the chorus of epithets and accusations and threats, but it was mercifully muffled by the deafening timpani crescendo of his heartbeat. It wasn't enough, though. Not enough to wake him. He had to get out, and there was one other avenue, one he'd discovered in childhood long before he'd learned the less obtrusive tricks. He'd used it in the barracks, too, much to Tain's amusement, and Julian tried to gather his wits and his will to use it now.

The other door was locked. He crashed into it, almost ricocheting off into the end table that held Sisko's ornate alien clock. But Julian wasn't looking for physical escape anymore. He whirled around, pressing his back to the striated surface and screwing his eyes closed against the advancing faces, familiar in form and unrecognizable in expression. He flung up his arms, elbows out, curled hands on either side of his head. And he screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed.

 _(fade_ )

His voice reverberated off the bare metal walls, almost deafening in the small space. The instant he felt his eyes snap open, Julian was scrambling to his feet. It was as if by distancing himself from the patch of floor warmed to an almost tolerable degree by the meagre heat of his body, he could distance himself from the dream as well. But there was nowhere to run. His right shoulder slammed into the opposite wall, and suddenly he was careening as he had done in the nightmare. His head barked against the ceiling, and the sightless blackness of the cell erupted into brilliant photon-bursts of coloured light that existed only in the outraged neurons of his forebrain.

The last scream was still fading in his ears. He groped for a wall, any wall, and found the wrong one. The searing cold of the uninsulated tritanium made him gasp, shrink away, slam his hip into the subtly more pliant surface of the door. He felt it shudder, and stumbled half a step back. There was a sharp line of stinging impact bisecting his right Achilles tendon, and the squawk of metal-on-metal as something wobbled, skittered, and sloshed.

_Sloshed. Oh, God, no…_

Julian's mindless panic suddenly narrowed and found focus. He whirled around and dropped to his knees, bare flesh protesting the sudden contact with the raised ridges on the floor. He groped in the dark, swiftly, frantically, but with the same meticulous precision with which he would have plunged his hands into a shrapnel-shredded body to pinch off a spurting artery. Fingers still nimble despite the numbing cold found the slick of spilled water, beading over the raised markings and pooling between them. He found the side of the bowl. Felt swiftly up it, over the rim, inside. His fingers plunged into water crisp with floating shards of half-formed ice. It took a moment for him to gather his wits enough to gauge that a two-centimetre depth remained, because his first instinct was abject relief that he hadn't spilled all of it.

He remained motionless for indeterminate minutes, curled over his knees with his elbows on the floor, his wrists in the air, his fingers curled possessively around the metal bowl. Julian's chest heaved and his head was pounding pitilessly. He couldn't think, at least not very clearly, and he didn't dare to move. He forced his body to be still in the hope that it might quiet his mind, and he gave silent thanks to whatever vicissitude of fortune or physics had prevented him from kicking the bowl on end instead of sending it skidding into the wall.

When his pulse quieted and his thoughts grew orderly again, he lifted the bowl with care so that he could lick the outside of it. His tongue carefully salvaged every drop of moisture still clinging to the side, even though the chill made his teeth ache. He reflected distantly that he'd have to see about enamel restoration when he — if he — got home to Deep Space Nine: the weeks without dental hygiene of any kind and the changes to his saliva brought about by chronic dehydration might have done more damage than he'd suspected.

When he was satisfied that the outside of the bowl was dry, Julian sat up just far enough to get his elbows off the floor. He set the dish aside, careful to set it down without sloshing again. Then he hesitated. His left hand travelled down to the floor again, finding the leading edge of the puddle. He didn't think he'd spilled more than eighty or ninety millilitres in his frenzy. He _could_ just tell himself that such a small amount was insignificant, not worth the price of retrieving it. But the clinician in him knew better, didn't it? Why else had he licked the outside of the bowl like that?

Besides, he was alone in the darkness. There was no one to see. No one to judge. He'd have to live with the memory and the knowledge of what desperation could make him sink to, but he could cope with that. All things bent to medical necessity, and right now water was the most urgent necessity of all.

Julian planted his palms and scooted back a little farther from the corner. Carefully he lowered himself over his knees, making use of his unimpeachable sense of spatial orientation. The tip of his nose just grazed the meniscus of the water, and he parted his lips to let his tongue slip past. Adjusting the angle of his head, he sank down further still. Then, like a dog, he began to drink the water from the puddle on the floor.

When he was through, cheeks burning with irrational mortification, Julian slid off his calves and slumped against the door. He scrubbed his face with one palm, trying not to feel the rasp of his incipient beard and the even more unpleasant grinding of shed skin and oils. He tried not to think about the hand he hadn't washed, even in the unsatisfying Dominion sanitizing unit, in two of the camp's brutally long days. Or had he been in here longer? He'd been deep in REM sleep for the nightmare to be so vivid: no telling how many klaxons he might have missed.

Time was meaningless here anyhow, at least to his mind. His body was feeling it. They'd given him water, but how long ago? And what about food? Did Deyos intend to leave him here to starve? Considering the dispute that had led to his punishment, that wasn't beyond imagining. Julian didn't know if he dared to hope that Tiellyn had maintained the prohibition on his death. Did she have the answers she wanted, or did he remain fascinating enough to preserve for further study?

He couldn't wander off into the underbrush of that trail of thought. He'd learned his lesson fretting about how his isolation might complicate a rescue attempt. He wasn't going to survive the present by constructing holosuite horrors of the future. His subconscious certainly wasn't helping: the nightmare's tentacles of terror were still wound around the malleable folds and crevices and sinuses of his all-too-active brain. Julian shuddered. He hugged his ribs. He closed his eyes. He tried to will the intrusive thoughts away. Just a nightmare. A bad dream, one more in the legions of bad dreams that had plagued him almost as far back as he could remember — back to a time when he'd been able to find comfort afterwards in the arms of a mother he'd believed loving, tender, trustworthy. Back even before the hospital, where Kukalaka had been his own consolation. The substance of the dreams had surely been different when they'd been Jules's nightmares, not Julian's. But the fear had felt the same, and they'd been equally unreal.

 _No, they weren't_ , said Garak. _Dreams of sea monsters and vicious ducks and monsters in the replicator aren't equally unreal to this one, are they? Be fair, my dear doctor. Apart from a little temporal contortion and identity amalgamation, that dream you just had was actually quite realistic. Tain's out there, you know, waiting for me to bring your Starfleet friends to save him. He knows what he knows. He's promised to tell. And what then?_

What then? What then, indeed. Julian shuddered. He didn't believe that Captain Sisko would say such hateful things, did he?

_Don't you?_

He almost cried out at that voice, with its wry, melodious lilt. His body jerked as if struck by an arc of ionizing electricity. Julian had to fight to keep himself from being sucked back into the depths of the dream. As it was, he couldn't stop the manifestation of a different frequency of his inner turmoil from going on in Captain Sisko's voice.

_I believe in the ideals of Starfleet, in the integrity of the uniform and those who wear it. I thought you did, too, Doctor. How do you think I'm going to react when I learn it's all a lie?_

The question was so calm, so rational, so unlike the spectre in the night terror. Because of that, it was impossible to shake. Julian couldn't dismiss it rationally, and he didn't know how to fight it. Because it was right; that was true. He had seen how Captain Sisko dealt with those who betrayed their oath to the Federation and cast off their duty to Starfleet. He remembered the shockwaves of unease that had rippled through the station during the business with Commander Hudson. He had seen the grim determination in Sisko's eyes when he had been deployed to track down his friend. And of course there was Eddington… how would the Captain address yet another betrayal, yet another deceiver, and this one not even a natural person?

 _He'll be disgusted,_ Jadzia opined coldly, from the far side of the tiny cell. _And so will I. Don't lie to yourself, Julian: if you get out of here and Tain betrays your secret, your life on Deep Space Nine is over._

Julian shuddered, drawing his knees up and fighting for control of his mind. It was useless. There was no distraction, not even the unenviable sort that the spilled water had provided. There was nothing to prevent him from spiralling inward, in a way he'd fought against since the emotional crisis that had almost cost him his sanity and his secret at sixteen. He had always been grateful for his work, his research, his hobbies and interests and endless distractions. But he'd never appreciated how desperately he needed them. Right now, he would have settled for the dispassionate cruelty of the Jem'Hadar or the biting sarcasm of Enabran Tain. Anything, anything at all to defend him from the maelstrom within.

 _Why did you befriend me in the first place? Why would you take a risk like that?_ Jadzia asked, in the light, taunting tone that usually left him both abashed and gratified. Now, there was only shame. _You didn't have to dig very far into the cultural database to learn how Trill feel about genetic enhancements. You thought the human aversion was strong, but it's nothing compared to ours_.

 _I wouldn't say it's nothing,_ Miles argued, just behind Julian's right shoulder. There was a wall there, and he couldn't be occupying such a position — but it was where he stood when Julian took his turn at the dartboard, and the sense memory was strong. His gruff, sometimes prickly, always fiercely loyal friend at his back, just where a best friend was supposed to be. _Don't forget that the Augments tried to enslave the rest of humanity. Ordinary people, just trying to live their lives in peace; conquered and oppressed and killed. The Eugenics Wars were just the beginning, too. Khan came back, didn't he? TWICE!_

 _It is a question of justice_. This rumbling voice was Worf, whom Julian hadn't really expected his mind to conjure up at all. They were colleagues, but they weren't exactly friends. In fact, his relationship with Worf was more like those he'd considered friendships at the Academy, when he'd had nothing in his life to compare them to: professional, functional, courteous, and a bit uncomfortable if Julian tried to transgress the unseen boundary between them. Not until medical school and Erit had Julian had a taste of true camaraderie, and even that paled in comparison to the friendships he'd found on Deep Space Nine…

 _Justice,_ Sisko agreed soberly. _What's the appropriate penalty for building a life on a lie?_

 _Just one lie_ , a small voice protested, wavering uncertainly in Julian's defence. At first he wondered if it was the childlike voice that had tried to argue for him in the dream, but no. It was Leeta, unsure and reluctant to try too hard to defend the man she'd liked but never really loved. And even though that had been mutual, their year together fun but ultimately insubstantial, their parting healthy and amicable, that still stung a little. There was a part of Julian, just in this moment not an inconsiderable part, that wondered if he was even worthy of love. Worse, if he was even truly capable of it.

 _One lie!_ Miles scoffed. _He's repeated it often enough. When he matriculated at the Academy, when he applied to Starfleet Medical, when he touched his first patient, when he took his oath. He's lived it every damned day he's worn that uniform. The Vorta was right to take it away! He's a disgrace._

 _I always knew there was something about you_ , Kira sneered out of nowhere. _Acting so superior, like you were better than all of us, better than the heroes who gave their lives for Bajor. You and your Federation arrogance… turns out it was more than just an affectation, doesn't it?_

"No…" Julian whispered, despite the sting in his throat. "No, that isn't… I didn't mean…" He'd never explained to her what he _had_ meant, tripping over his tongue like that on their first meeting. He'd never explained those words, _this is where heroes are made_. Never told her how much he admired the heroes that _had_ been made on Bajor: people like her, Kira Nerys, who'd risen up against impossible odds to defy cruel overlords with no right to their world…

 _Sounds familiar, doesn't it?_ Miles chuckled. _You think she won't figure that out and draw that comparison? Cardassians, convinced they're superior, conquering Bajor. Khan and the others, convinced they're superior, conquering Earth nation by nation, continent by continent._

 _Excellent point, Chief!_ laughed Garak, and the part of Julian's mind still speaking with Julian's voice couldn't enumerate the ways in which this was an illogical response. Garak didn't see Cardassia as the villain in the Occupation — not as the hero, either, thank goodness, but certainly as one power cloaked in shades of grey going up against another equally questionable. It was a perversion of modern history they'd argued more than once, and maybe that meant Garak would take a more lenient view of Julian's secret. He'd certainly be amused by all the lies…

 _I told you_! his father taunted. _I told you to stay on Earth, didn't I? I warned you this Starfleet fantasy was pointless. But you wouldn't listen!_

 _You didn't warn me about_ this _!_ Julian protested feebly. They'd argued, seemingly endlessly, about the merits of a career among the stars, but his father's arguments had always circled around wasted potential and the more prestigious ways Julian might put his talents to use. When he'd taken the remote, stationary, largely undesirable posting on Deep Space Nine, Richard Bashir had laughed at him. But he'd never demanded to know what Julian thought would happen if he got caught serving in Starfleet illegally. Because his father had been convinced, with the arrogance of the itinerant prestidigitator too unskilled for the big stage, that Julian would never be caught. That _they_ would never be caught.

What would his father think when he learned an aging, semi-retired Cardassian had unravelled his careful lies so easily?

 _Don't be cruel, Jules._ This was his mother's voice, chiding, her gentle Arabic diction blurring but not concealing the accusation. _You know Tain isn't an ordinary man_.

 _Takes one to know one!_ Richard crowed. Garak was laughing, too. Miles made a sound of disgust.

 _That is beside the point!_ Worf thundered, belligerent and determined. _He must be punished_.

 _Punished_ , agreed Sisko, without pleasure but with grimmest resolve.

 _Punished_ , Jadzia spat.

Julian clamped his hands over his ears and buried his face against his bare, stinging knees. He rocked a little, an instinctive self-soothing gesture that in a less desperate moment his doctor's mind would have diagnosed for the sign of extreme emotional distress that it was. He couldn't block out their voices, he couldn't defeat his own fears, and he was swamped with the same kind of irrational terrors and doubts that had almost crippled him when he'd first learned the truth.

Still a small part of him spoke up, from deep within, to wonder bleakly: _Isn't this punishment enough?_

_(fade to black)_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Klingons Do Not Cuddle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18275249) by [phoenixjaxa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixjaxa/pseuds/phoenixjaxa)




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